The Burning Page (The Invisible Library 3)

She stopped to look up at the bookcases around her. They were as tall as tower blocks – impossibly high for their size, structurally unsound, constructions that should have toppled over even before they were loaded with books. But nobody was standing on the top and looking down at her that she could see. Yet.

Irene wove a zigzag course towards the centre, taking side turns and avoiding taking a single open roadway between shelves. She tried to combine silence with as much speed as was humanly possible. Alberich might be able to enter the physical environment again shortly. At which point she would be a messy smear on the landscape.

She turned a corner, lurking in the shadow and looking to the left and right. No sign of Alberich. But something was wrong. Her instincts were screaming at her.

Wait. By the angle of the bookshelves, there shouldn’t be a shadow there. Which meant that the shadow was being cast by something irregular above her. Which meant . . .

‘Books, form a shield above me!’ she shouted, in the same breath that a voice from above called down, ‘Shelves, crush that woman!’

Books and shelves collided above her head. Irene ran for cover in a shower of wood and pages and dust, mentally cursing her opponent’s grasp of tactics. What could she do to stop him? She needed either to be up on the same level as him, or to find some way of hiding herself from him.

She looked up at the high bookshelves again. She did have an advantage. She was on the ground. Gravity was her advantage.

‘Ready to surrender yet, Ray?’ Alberich called down to her.

Irene pressed her back against her current shelter. The metal corners of an unfamiliar book ground into her shoulders, and she shifted sideways to ease it out from its place on the shelf. That would do. ‘Are you going to shout “Come out, come out, wherever you are”?’ she answered.

‘If you make this a children’s story, then I’ll make it a cautionary tale,’ he taunted. There was no sign of any movement in the surrounding shadows. She couldn’t get a bearing on where he was. But the shadow she’d seen above her had been cast by a real thing, and the voice talking to her now was a human voice. The earlier thing had sounded anything but . . . So Alberich was back in a human form again. Less dangerous in some ways, more in others. ‘Did you ever read your Struwwelpeter?’

The door flew open, in he ran, the great, long, red-legged scissorman! ‘My parents never liked me reading horror stories.’ Irene edged sideways along, squinting up at the tops of the surrounding bookcases. The clock sounded louder now. She prayed that didn’t signify anything ominous for her Library. ‘So of course I read them anyhow.’

‘You sound like the disobedient type. I should have recruited you earlier.’ And there he was, just the edge of a curve of a shadow on the bookcase to her left, the equivalent of two storeys up. He’d gone down on all fours, making his shadow smaller, but now that she’d spotted him she could keep track of him. ‘The offer’s still open.’

Irene brought the book she was holding to her lips. ‘I still don’t understand what you want from me,’ she said, trying to make it sound like negotiation. ‘I’m not the only young Librarian out there. I’m certainly not the only one who’s ever been demoted. Convince me that you aren’t about to kill me the minute I step out of hiding.’

‘You’re the only one I can find who read that story in the Grimm book.’

‘It’s that important to you?’

‘It is. You see, Ray, I need to find my son.’

The words my son didn’t make sense at first. The story in the Grimm book had mentioned his sister’s child, not his child, and Irene’s first thought was that Alberich must have misread something. But then the concepts fell into place in her mind, and she tasted bile in her mouth. His son. His sister’s son. What he did to his own sister . . . Perhaps Alberich expected that reaction from her, for he paused only for a moment before he went on. ‘The Library kept him from me, Ray. Don’t I have a right to my own flesh and blood?’

There were so many things wrong with that statement that Irene found herself incapable of answering. She snapped out of her momentary shock and whispered to the book in her hands, ‘Book that I am holding, fly up and knock that man up there from where he stands!’

The book went up like a comet, scraping her fingers with the force of its ascent. A cry of, ‘Shelves, shield me!’ and the meaty thud of an impact came from above her.

But Irene was already running. ‘Dust, hide me!’ she shouted, holding a length of tattered tulle across her nose and mouth against the rising clouds of dust.

She trailed her free hand along the bookcases lining the passage so as not to collide with them. Tears ran from her eyes as she blinked frantically, trying to see where she was going. This method of hiding herself did have a few associated problems. But at least it concealed her from Alberich.

Until he loses patience and just levels all the bookshelves in the area, her sense of incoming doom pointed out. Keep on running.

The astonishing thing was that he hadn’t done what he did once before – sinking her into the floor and calling on all sorts of chaotic forces to destroy her. If it had been Irene trying to destroy him, she’d have used whatever she had available.

Unless . . . could she have missed something here? Alberich had created this place, or at least forged it out of a Fae world so far gone into chaos that it had no firm reality left. He’d set it up in a very specific way. Did this mean that he couldn’t go round unleashing chaotic power into it randomly, any more than a mad scientist would set off dynamite in the middle of his own laboratory? It would explain a few things.

Though it wouldn’t save her, if Alberich caught up with her. Even if he left her alive in return for telling him about his . . . son. She couldn’t help flicking through a mental list of male Librarians she knew, wondering if they might be the son in question. Admittedly she was better at discussing their literary tastes than their pre-Library histories, but she didn’t think any of them could have had that sort of history.

The fog of dust blinded Irene nearly as much as it did Alberich, and she was taken by surprise as she stumbled into the central area. She was conscious of a wide-open space in front of her, even if she couldn’t see it clearly yet, and some sort of massive tangle of open dark stairs and glowing lights.

‘Bookcases!’ came a furious shriek from above her. ‘Block her way!’

The two high bookcases on either side of her bowed down and collapsed in a great landslide of shelves and books. Pages filled the air, mingling with the dust and tumbling like huge snowflakes. She had to dodge back frantically to avoid being hit by the falling bookcases, and then her way was well and truly blocked. She’d have to clamber over them, or go round – either of which would lose time and make her far too obvious.

Something that had been nagging at the back of her mind finally broke through. This is a high-chaos world. Alberich’s using the Language far more to frame his intent than in terms of precise description. And I’m doing the same. Just how far can I push this?

She gritted her teeth and braced herself. ‘Floor! Open beneath the barrier and let me pass!’