The Invisible Library (5 page)

‘You can’t,’ Irene answered.

‘How do you cope?’

Irene gestured at the corridor. ‘This
is
my world.’

‘Seriously?’

Irene’s hand tightened on her book. ‘Remember I told you that my parents were both Librarians? I wasn’t born in the Library, but I might as well have been. They brought me in
here when I was still a baby. They used to take me on jobs. Mother said I was the best prop she’d ever had.’ She smiled faintly at the memory. ‘Father used to tell me a bedtime
story about how they smuggled a manuscript in my nappy bag.’

‘No.’ Kai came to a stop.
‘Seriously.’

Irene blinked. ‘I am serious. I used to ask him to tell it every night.’

‘They took you on missions like that?’

‘Oh.’ Irene could see what was bothering him now. ‘Not
dangerous
ones, just safe ones where I was useful. They left me behind on the dangerous ones. And then later on,
when I needed proper teaching and social acclimatization, they put me in a boarding school. The only problem was that I had to be careful how much holiday time I spent in the Library, or it’d
have thrown me out of time-sync with the world I was schooling in. They did talk about moving me between worlds to different schools so that I could have years at the Library in between, but we
didn’t think it would work.’ She’d been so proud to have had them talk it over with her, to have them treat her as an adult and ask her opinion.

‘And you had . . . friends at boarding school, right?’ Kai put the question tentatively, as though she was going to bite his head off for asking it.

‘Of course.’

‘Still in contact with any of them?’

‘The time factor counts against it.’ Irene shrugged. ‘With the amount of time I had to spend in dedicated study in the Library, or in other worlds, it’s been hard . . . I
did stay in contact with some of them for a while. I dropped off letters whenever I could, but ultimately it didn’t work. It was a school in Switzerland. A nice place. Very good on
languages.’

They turned another corner. Ahead of them, the corridor narrowed dramatically, and began to slope upwards. The floor, walls and ceiling were all made of the same creaking boards, worn and aged.
Panel windows in the left wall looked out over an empty street lit by flaring torches, where muddy wheeltracks marked the passage of traffic, but there was no sign of anyone there.

‘Straight ahead?’ Kai asked.

Irene nodded. The floor creaked under their feet as they began the climb.

‘This is like a bridge,’ Kai said.

‘Passageways between the Wings are always a little strange. I went through one once that you had to crawl through.’

‘How did they move books through that?’

‘They didn’t, usually. They routed them round some other way. But it was useful if you were in a hurry.’

He jerked a thumb at the window. ‘Have
you
ever seen anyone out there?’

‘No. Nor has anyone.’ The passageway levelled out, then began to slope downwards again. ‘Now if only we could find a Traverse that accessed onto that, wouldn’t it be
interesting.’

‘Yeah. That was one of the big topics of conversation among the students.’ Kai sighed.

Irene had been looking around, and she saw what she wanted on the left. ‘Just a moment,’ she said, indicating a slot in the wall. ‘Let me drop this book off for
Coppelia.’

Kai nodded, and slouched against the wall, leaving Irene to take an envelope from the stack by the wall slot and slide her book into it. He did lean over just a little bit as she scribbled
Coppelia’s name on the envelope, just enough to see the title of the book, and his eyes narrowed in curiosity. ‘You could always take it to her in person,’ he suggested.
‘Say you wanted to make sure she got it, and ask her a bit more about the assignment while you were there.’

Irene dropped the envelope into the slot and raised an eyebrow at him. ‘Yes, and I could also get myself called an ignorant buffoon who didn’t know how to read orders, let alone
follow them. Someone who clearly didn’t deserve any sort of mission, if I was just going to come running back to her for more details when she’d given me everything I needed.’

‘Oh.’ Kai sighed. ‘Oh well.’

‘Did you think I hadn’t heard that speech from her?’

‘I know I have. I was kind of hoping you hadn’t.’

‘Yes.’ Irene gave him a brief smile before starting to walk again. ‘Good try, though. So, 395.’ The corridor turned and they walked into a room containing two terminals
on a glossy ceramic table. One was being used by a young man, who didn’t bother looking up, keeping his focus on the monitor’s screen. His brown suit was scruffy and battered at the
elbows and knees, and lace cuffs framed his bony wrists. It was probably appropriate for whatever alternate he’d just come from, or was about to go to. And it was still better than
Irene’s current battered grey dress.

‘See,’ Irene said, and took a seat at the other terminal. ‘Give me a moment and I’ll find the best route to get to the Traverse point for this mission.’
And pick
up anything else I can about that world,
she added to herself. She’d been too flustered by Kai’s arrival to do the sort of research she’d normally put in on a mission. Also,
even if they were briefed by the alternate’s Librarian-in-Residence, it’d be useful to have some idea of where they were going.

Kai looked around pointedly at the lack of other chairs, then sank down to sit cross-legged with his back to the wall, with an air of saintly patience.

Irene quickly logged in and pulled up the map. The Traverse to B-395 was within half an hour’s walk. Better than she’d hoped. No wonder Coppelia had sent Kai to her, rather than have
Irene come to meet her. She reached for the usual pen and notepad, and jotted down directions, before looking for more information on the alternate itself.

Her reaction must have shown on her face, because Kai straightened and frowned at her. ‘What is it—’

Irene hastily pointed at the other young man, and mouthed
Shhh,
putting her finger to her lips in as obvious a manner as she could.

Kai glared at her, then relaxed again, looking away.

She scribbled down the few facts hastily, then folded the paper and logged off the computer. With a vague nod to the young man, she got to her feet and strode for the door. ‘Come on,
Kai,’ she said briskly.

Kai rose elegantly to his feet and strolled after her, his hands in his pockets.

Some way down the corridor on the far side, once out of earshot, she said, ‘I apologize for that.’

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ Kai replied. He twitched a shoulder in casual dismissal, seemingly fascinated by the beech-panelling and decorated plaster ceiling. His voice was arctic in
tone. ‘You’re quite right, I shouldn’t have made a noise and disturbed other students at work. I apologize for offending against the Library rules—’

‘Look,’ Irene said before he could get any more sarcastic, ‘don’t get me wrong. I’m not apologizing for being rule-orientated.’

‘Oh?’

‘No. I’m apologizing for snapping at you to shut you up, because I couldn’t discuss classified information with someone else in the room.’

Kai took a few more paces. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Right.’

Irene decided that was the closest to an apology
she
was going to get for the moment. ‘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, she thought furiously. What was Coppelia thinking, sending them there? 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 an institution upholding order. 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.

‘And there’s no balancing element that’s trying to bring the world from chaos back to order?’

‘No. Either the dragons don’t know about that alternate, or they’re just staying well out of it.’ And what she didn’t say, as she was struggling to calm her own
fears, was that without a balancing element, a corrupted world could tip all the way over into primal chaos. Nobody could be sure where the dividing line between chaos infestation and total
absorption might lie. And she sure didn’t want to find out.

Kai frowned. ‘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.’

‘Well, according to the records, there’s no sign of them there.’ It might be true that the dragons disliked chaos, being creatures of law and structure. Irene had received the
same basic briefing as Kai. But that didn’t necessarily mean they were going to interfere wherever it was found. From her own personal experience with alternate worlds, Irene had come to the
conclusion that dragons preferred to choose their battles carefully. ‘Perhaps the world’s Librarian will know a bit more. His name’s Dominic Aubrey. He’s got a cover job on
the British Library staff. Head of the Classical Manuscripts section.’ She tilted her head to look at Kai. ‘Is something the matter?’

Kai shoved his hands further into his pockets. ‘Look, I know they tell us students the worst possible scenarios in orientation so that we won’t try anything stupid. And they probably
make them seem even worse than they actually are, but a world with a high chaos infestation with no dragons to even start balancing it . . . sounds kind of risky for a first assignment for me and
for . . .’

‘For a junior grade like me?’

‘You said it,’ Kai muttered. ‘I didn’t.’

Irene sighed. ‘For what it’s worth, I’m not happy either.’

‘So how bad is it?’

She considered running her hands through her hair, having a hysterical fit, and sitting down and not doing anything for the next few hours while she tried to figure out a way to avoid the job.
‘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.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘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.’

‘Oh well,’ Kai said with jaunty enthusiasm. ‘No problem there.’

‘What?’

‘I’m from a Gamma, remember? I’m used to figuring out magic. Even if I didn’t do it myself, we had to know how to work the system if we wanted to stay out of trouble.
Magic always seems to involve taboos and prohibitions too. So all we have to do is work out what these are and then avoid them while we pick up the document or book. No problemo.’

Irene nodded. ‘So, high chaos infestation.’ The thought clearly worried her far more than it did Kai. Possibly because she’d had experience with a chaos infestation before and
hadn’t enjoyed it at all.

Chaos made worlds act 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 break down order.

She had no idea where to start coping with chaos. No one knew exactly how or why chaos broke through into an alternate – or maybe that knowledge was above her paygrade. But it was never
natural to that world and seemed drawn to order so it could break it down, warping what it touched. It created things that worked by irrational laws. It infected worlds and it broke down natural
principles. It wasn’t good for any world it entered, and it wasn’t good for the humanity in that world.

Even if it did make for good literature.

The Library had a whole set of quarantines for chaos infestations. But the one on this particular alternate was one of the most extreme she’d ever seen, while still permitting entrance.
She wasn’t happy about taking a student along on the job, however well he thought he could handle things.

‘Pity Madame Coppelia didn’t give us more information,’ Kai remarked. ‘And don’t look at me like that. We’re both thinking the same thing, right? I’m
just saying it so that you don’t have to.’

Irene nearly laughed. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘We agree on that one. And we both agree it’s going to be bad, and neither of us really knows each other either. So it’s
probably going to be messy, nasty and dangerous. Then if we do manage to get the manuscript, I’m sure it’ll be top-secret and we’ll be lucky to get any sort of mention of it on
our records at all because everything will be buried in the files.’

‘Remind me why I took this job,’ Kai muttered.

‘People pointed guns at you. Right?’

‘Yeah. Something like that.’

‘And you like books.’ She glanced sidelong at him.

He flashed a quick, genuine smile at her. ‘Yeah. That would be it.’

They exited their latest corridor to find themselves overlooking a large hall. Their route continued along a wrought-iron bridge with ornate railings, which arced grandly from side to side above
the open book-lined space, staircases winding up the walls to meet it at various points.

‘Hey,’ Kai said in pleased tones, ‘I’ve been in this one before. There were a load of Faust variants down there.’ He pointed over to the lower right corner of the
room. ‘I was cross-correlating versions from different alternates for Master Legis. It was a training exercise, but it was one of the better ones, you know?’