The Masked City (The Invisible Library 2)

The next flight of stairs was brutal. It went up at an angle of perhaps sixty degrees, each step formed of pale slippery marble and high enough that Irene’s legs were aching before they were halfway up. Vale reached the top ahead of her and looked back - but no one was following them yet.

Irene pulled herself up to the top step. Then, gritting her teeth, she checked the pendant again. It was finally pointing somewhere concrete - at an enormous pillar to the right of their staircase. The pillar was vast, around ninety feet across, and as far as she could make out, it ran from the floor to the ceiling of the prison. Bridges protruded from it like spurs at different heights, and it was ornamented with jutting pennants sporting incomprehensible grey-on-grey designs.

But when they reached it, there weren’t even any obvious windows or grilles penetrating its interior. Irene walked around it, holding the pendant out hopefully, but while it indicated the pillar from every direction, it didn’t favour any particular place to start.

‘I could try commanding it,’ she said dubiously. ‘Telling it to open or something?’ It should work, but it might also open every other closed door within range of her voice. And she really didn’t want to meet the other prisoners here.

‘Let me examine it first,’ Vale snapped. He was all alertness now, tense and focused. He dropped to his knees in front of the column, leaning in till his nose was half an inch from the floor. There, he shuffled along on all fours, squinting at it mysteriously. After what seemed an age, he sprang to his feet, running his fingers up the seam between two of the blocks of stone. ‘I - yes, I believe I have it. Here.’ His voice was quiet, but as tense as a tuned violin string. He tapped at a particular point, at approximately eye level. ‘Winters, I believe there is a lock of some sort here, which would normally require a key, but under the circumstances …’

Irene nodded. She stepped next to him and leaned in until her lips were nearly touching the stone. ‘Lock, open,’ she murmured.

The seam in the column parted, and one of the blocks of stone swung inwards to reveal a short, dark passageway with an open space just visible beyond. It was entirely silent as they both crept inside.

The room at the centre of the pillar was cold and dim, lit by thin shards of light, which fell from slits in the walls high above. And there Kai was at last, chained against the far wall.

It would have been dignified to stand back and make a clever remark, but Irene was past dignity. She threw her arms around Kai, heedless of whether there might be any traps, and simply hugged him for a long moment.

He was in shirt and trousers that had seen better days, with his waistcoat hanging loose, and bruises showed livid on his face. A heavy dark collar circled his neck, with no visible lock, and thick shackles of iron bound his wrists to the wall. He looked at Irene and Vale as if they were an impossibility, as if they might not really be here at all.

Irene took a deep breath. Her eyes burned, and for a moment she thought she was going to sniffle embarrassingly. ‘I am very unimpressed with these lodgings,’ she said, pushing herself away from Kai with an effort. He was alive - something that she’d doubted in her darkest moments. She slipped the pendant over her head again. ‘Vale, do you think you can pick those locks?’

Seemingly lost for words, Vale clasped Kai’s shoulder for a moment - probably the closest he could come to Irene’s own hug - and then turned to examine the iron cuffs on Kai’s wrists. ‘If they were normal locks, I am certain that I could,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately, I suspect that they have Fae enchantments on them. Can you give me any information about them, Strongrock?’

Kai opened his mouth, then shut it, then opened it again. ‘Irene … Vale …’ His voice was rusty and dry. He looked between them desperately. ‘You are real, aren’t you? Not some sort of illusion? If I told you to pinch me, then would you pinch me?’

‘Yes,’ Irene said sharply. ‘I would. And I would pinch you so hard you’d wish you’d never asked. Kai, we are here - you aren’t hallucinating. We came.’ She hugged him again, trying to convince him. ‘And we’re probably running out of time. I’ll answer questions later. Do you know anything about those shackles?’

‘The collar’s enchanted, to keep me in this form and bind my powers,’ Kai said, then stopped, shaking his head. His voice shook. ‘I’m sorry. I still can’t … I don’t know about the others. Maybe if Irene uses the Language - how did you get here? We’re down in the far end of chaos.’

‘We are in the ancient prison of a particularly corrupt group of Fae, whose world bears a resemblance to a romantic seventeenth-century Venice,’ Vale said, stepping back and almost visibly withdrawing himself from emotional displays. ‘We arrived by train. Winters, you may deal with the chains. It’s impossible for me to open those locks.’

Irene wished she could be that short on detail when reporting to Coppelia. Of course reporting to Coppelia implied that she would get out of here alive … ‘Hmm,’ she said, bending in close and staring at the chains. ‘My abilities don’t allow me to sense anything specific about these. Vale, we may want to stand back. I’ll try the collar first.’ She thought for a moment and then, using as much precision as she could, she said, ‘Collar around the dragon’s neck, unlock and part and open.’

Her voice sank through the air like ink into water, as the Language echoed in the room. She had meant to speak quietly, but something made the air tremble like a stifled drumbeat. She felt Vale recoil and step backwards, and Kai gasped in pain, his back arching as the collar tightened around his throat.

Irene had a moment to think I’ve killed Kai, in a heartbeat that seemed to stretch out into eternity. ‘COLLAR, OPEN!’ she screamed, throwing all the weight and focus she could into the words.

The collar shuddered, its surface rippling and shimmering like watered silk, and then flew apart. The fragments whirred outwards, a couple of them slicing Kai’s upstretched arms, and buried themselves into the stone walls and floor. Kai collapsed, hanging from the chains on his wrists, coughing and gasping. A fresh red band of pressure showed vividly around his throat.

Completely drained, Irene put a hand out to balance herself against the wall, swaying as she stood there. She was conscious of Vale dashing forward to check Kai’s pulse and mutter to him, but for the moment she could only concentrate on breathing and staying upright. There had been a purpose in that collar, and it had taken a lot of her strength to break it.

‘Irene?’ Kai’s voice. Ragged, but functional.

‘Let me take a look at those cuffs,’ she said, pulling herself together and walking over to join Vale and Kai. She hoped it didn’t look too much like a stagger.

‘Let’s hope they were meant to hold Fae,’ Vale observed. ‘If so, they should be less effective at holding Strongrock.’

‘For holding Fae?’ Kai said, looking at his wrists in disgust.

‘This is a Fae prison,’ Irene said. ‘You’re not the usual sort of inhabitant. All right. Let’s do this.’

It was an anticlimax when the cuffs came away without drama, after a single phrase from the Language. Kai fell forward onto his knees, but quickly dragged himself up, rubbing at his wrists where the metal had cut into his skin.

There was something else in the room now. It was linked to the growing anger in Kai’s eyes and the way he held himself. It was the same pressure that Irene had felt when Kai’s uncle had turned his full attention on her, only more raw, more dangerous and more likely to explode at any moment. They imprisoned a dragon. What happens when the dragon gets free? She thought she could hear a distant rumbling outside.

She had to keep him focused. ‘Kai,’ she said. ‘Stay with us. We have a plan to get out of here, but there are men on our trail. We need to get back through Venice to reach the Fae Train, our route in and out of there, but I don’t think you can tolerate that world in your proper form.’

Kai looked at her, his eyes suddenly all black. For a moment the fern-patterns of scales were visible on the skin of his cheeks and hands, and the lines of his face were something inhuman and terrifying.