The Invisible Library (The Invisible Library 1)

‘I hope not.’ The elder Miss Retrograde rapped Kai on the shoulder. ‘I’ll take that assistance, young man. You two can tell me why you’re pretending to be Canadian later.’

Kai put one hand under the elder Miss Retrograde’s elbow, bent to put the other under her shoe, and boosted her up on the table with barely a sign of effort. ‘Later,’ he promised, and ran. He was heading for a low-hanging banner, which dangled temptingly near a pair of ornate sabres hanging eight feet up.

Elsewhere around the room, Irene could see other men and women climbing on the tables, some of which had given way in the process. It was sheer luck that there had only been a few people left in their corner of the room, and so the tables were comparatively unoccupied. This was apparently not one of those alternate worlds where the British Empire mandated a tradition of women and children first. It was a case of survival of the fittest, and alligators take the hindmost.

From her vantage point she looked around, finally sighting Bradamant. She was athletically swinging herself onto a free table and tossing a platter of mussels into the jaws of the pursuing alligator in one smooth motion. The alligator paused, grunting and shaking its head, as Bradamant smoothed her skirts and looked around.

Irene’s and Bradamant’s eyes met. For a moment they looked at each other across the room, then Bradamant turned away, with a jerk of her head and a little smile. She scanned the crowd, clearly looking for someone else. Irene swallowed bile. Was she still so preoccupied by Bradamant that she had to look for where she was first, and be sure that she was safe? Interest in a fellow Librarian’s welfare only went so far.

And where was Vale? With a pang of guilt she scanned the crowd for him too, finally managing to catch sight of him. He’d been backed into a corner by two alligators, and was defending himself with a silver tray as best he could. Of course, he would have had to leave his swordstick at the door. It didn’t look good.

‘Kai!’ Irene turned to find him. He’d managed to climb up the banner, almost high enough to reach the sabres. ‘Help Vale! Over there!’

Judging by his frown, Kai could see Vale struggling even better than she could. He clamped the banner between his legs, reached up with both hands, and grabbed the hilts of both sabres: then he simply let go. The sabres came free from their brackets with a shriek of metal, and Kai fell the eight feet to the ground, twisting smoothly in mid-air to land on both feet.

‘Vale!’ he shouted, loud enough to be heard over the screaming mob. ‘Here!’ People backed away from him at his shout, and he tossed one of the blades in a high arc through the air; it spun above the crowd in a shimmer of steel. Vale snatched it out of the air, the throw perfectly weighted to slap the hilt into his hand. Then he sheared the metal contraption off a lunging alligator’s skull with one vicious slice.

Irene let out a breath, unaware that she’d stopped breathing. Apparently both Kai and Vale possessed previously unappreciated keen fighting reflexes. Taking down a giant robot centipede seemed comparatively simple in retrospect.

Kai shouted something in a Chinese dialect that Irene didn’t recognize, perhaps a battle cry or a curse, and leapt into the fight. He impaled one alligator, closing its jaws with a single sabre thrust just before the creature could bite into a waiter.

Irene sidled further along the table, and tried to think of a plan. The alligators weren’t showing any interest in the piles of spilled food that littered the floor. And while she wasn’t an expert on reptilian psychology, animals would normally go for an abundance of convenient meals rather than armed dinner guests. Whether in the grip of a feeding frenzy or not. So maybe the buzzing metal things bolted onto their heads were controlling their behaviour – a theory that seemed borne out from observation of Vale’s former aggressor.

The alligator which had been de-metal-objected by Vale had retreated, and was currently wandering around in a dazed way. That was promising. If they could de-weaponize all the alligators, then they’d have . . . well, they’d have a mob of normal alligators. Which wasn’t much, but it would be something. Especially as neither Fae magic nor the Language use was working. Bradamant, however . . .

Irene sprinted along her table, skirts in hand. Bradamant was a table and an alligator-infested stretch of floor away. The table wasn’t a problem. The chunk of floor was – and there were people dying out there.

She just didn’t have time to think about that. It was clear to her left. Clear to her right. ‘Stay up here!’ an elderly gentleman sputtered behind her. ‘Dash it, girl, don’t go committing suicide! Wait just a minute and the police will be here – ’

No. She couldn’t wait. She tried to rationalize why, as really all the screaming, shooting and sounds of ripping flesh were irrelevant to her mission to get the book – to her duty as a Librarian. She could just stay put. But as she tried to shut out all the unimportant noises, she found herself already acting. She swung away from the man and dropped onto the floor, running for the other table.

A man was lying under it, tumbled across a fold of fallen white cloth. He was bleeding freely, which meant that he was still alive.

Irene pulled herself up onto the table, vaguely conscious that her skirt was fouled with blood and salmon. ‘Bradamant!’ she called, pitching her voice to carry above the noise.

‘Yes?’ Bradamant came stalking down the table, brushing aside other men and women by sheer force of personality. Her hair was still perfect, and her gown was only stained at the very edges. ‘I hope you have something useful to say.’

Irene forced down her hostility. ‘I do. I have an idea, but I’m having problems with the Language. I need your help.’

For a moment she wondered if Bradamant was going to put conditions on that help, but the other woman barely hesitated. ‘What do you have in mind?’

Irene pointed up at the chandelier – the elegant, huge, electric-lit chandelier. ‘The things on the alligators’ heads are specific and discrete. Use the Language to call electricity down into them. Even if it doesn’t kill them, it’ll wreck their control systems.’

Bradamant turned her head to follow Irene’s gesture. ‘It might also kill some of the guests if they’re in contact,’ she said neutrally.

Irene hadn’t thought of that. It only took a moment to imagine Vale or Kai with their blades in an alligator. ‘So be precise in your language!’ she snapped. ‘Or do you want me to find the vocabulary for you?’

Bradamant sniffed. ‘I don’t think that I will need your help for that endeavour.’ Her tone suggested Irene’s total incompetence would render any assistance worthless.

Irene should have let her get on with it, but a sudden thought struck her. ‘When did you come through from the Library?’

‘We have no time for this discussion,’ Bradamant declared. ‘Stand back and let me work.’

Irene stepped back and scanned the crowd as Bradamant prepared. Silver was easiest to spot. He’d found an ornate pike and was busy impaling an alligator with it, gullet to tail. Vale and Kai were back to back, surrounded by half a dozen alligators. No one else was being targeted so heavily. She couldn’t recall anything from Dominic Aubrey’s notes about the Iron Brotherhood. They were fairly obviously anti-Fae, what with shoeing their alligators with cold iron and staging the attack here and now. But she wouldn’t have thought that made them anti-Vale. Quite the opposite, really: Vale clearly had no particular liking for the Fae, and his attendance here was adversarial rather than friendly towards Silver. Were the alligators being somehow specifically directed? Or were they simply attacking those people who offered the most resistance?

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.

The chandelier trembled where it hung, then shattered, prisms chiming and blowing apart in puffs of crystal dust. Electricity forked down in visible arcs of lightning, targeting the alligators’ electronic attachments. The reptiles spasmed and thrashed, tails sweeping in wide curves as their jaws opened and closed on empty air.