‘I don’t want to complain or anything,’ Kai said, ‘but we’re currently holed up in a cheap hotel.’
‘We are,’ Irene agreed. She sat down and began to work her buttoned boots off, with a sigh of relief.
‘This place isn’t just cheap, it’s filthy!’ Kai gestured round at the tatty yellow wallpaper, the dirt-streaked window, the threadbare counterpane on the double bed, the sallow mirror on the rickety dresser. ‘You can’t seriously expect us to—’
‘Kai,’ Irene said firmly. ‘You’re spoilt. What happened to the shady but useful background? What happened to being a cool street runner who could handle that sort of thing? Have five years in the Library really softened you up that much?’
Kai looked around, and his nose wrinkled. ‘Yes,’ he finally said. ‘They have.’ He sat down on the very edge of the bed. ‘Is this much deep cover really necessary? Couldn’t we, you know, go and hide out at the most expensive hotel in town and claim we’re Canadians?’
‘No,’ Irene said. She removed one boot and started to work on the other. ‘Deep cover. For the moment, I want us untraceable. We’ll clean up tomorrow and find a nicer place.’
‘Is something the matter?’
Irene pulled off the second boot. ‘Oof.’ She had to tell him; it wouldn’t be safe to keep him ignorant. ‘There is a potential problem,’ she admitted slowly. ‘I don’t know that it’s an immediate issue.’
Kai just looked at her.
‘I had an urgent message from the Library.’ The next few words were difficult to say, and even more difficult to keep calm and reasonable. ‘It warned me to beware Alberich. You can pour me some of that brandy now.’
Kai’s hand halted halfway to the brandy bottle, on Irene’s list of essential supplies. ‘Wait,’ he said slowly. ‘When you say Alberich, do you mean the one who’s supposed to be . . .’ He trailed off, leaving it hanging. And, Irene noted to her displeasure, not pouring her brandy either.
‘No,’ Irene said. ‘I don’t mean the one who’s supposed to be. I mean the one who is. Not that I’ve ever met him, and with any luck we won’t have to, and this is just a precaution.’ She hoped. ‘Now can I have that brandy?’
‘He’s real?’ Kai said. Still no brandy.
‘He’s recorded in the Library. How could he not be real?’
Kai looked blank. ‘He could be fictional?’
Irene gritted her teeth. ‘No. He was formally marked for the Library, given the initiation and everything. That’s why he can’t go back there. It’d know he was there. But it proves that he is real, that he’s not some sort of urban legend like the thing about the pipes and the tentacle monster.’ That had been one of the popular ones when she was a trainee. The logic was that if rooms of the Library could be connected by the plumbing, then there was some sort of dark central cistern with a huge tentacle monster living in it which ate old Librarians. And of course it was all covered up by order from on high . . . She and other trainees had spent several hopeful hours rapping on pipes and trying to pass messages or find tentacles. ‘Brandy?’ she finished.
Kai finally remembered to get up and open the bottle. He splashed a bare quarter-inch into a battered china cup, and offered it to her.
‘Thank you,’ Irene said, and knocked it back in one gulp, then offered the cup for a refill. ‘A bit more this time, please.’
Kai stared at her. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’
‘It’s been a busy evening,’ Irene said. ‘And I’m going to be sitting up for the next few hours studying the local Language listings that Dominic gave us. You can get some sleep.’
‘But we ought to tell Dominic at once! After all, if Alberich’s here, it proves how important the book is! And we should warn Dominic—’
‘How?’ Irene enquired. She’d decided a while back that Socratic questioning was a good idea, because (a) it got students thinking for themselves, (b) sometimes they came up with ideas she hadn’t thought of, and (c) it gave her more time to think while they were trying to find answers.
‘We can go to the British Library – oh, wait. It won’t be open at this time of night.’
‘It won’t,’ Irene agreed, ‘which is going to be annoying if we need to sneak back in there at some point to get back to the Library. And he didn’t give us a home address.’ It should have been in those papers he’d given them. It wasn’t. Which, a niggling voice at the back of her mind pointed out, had been careless of Dominic. Almost to the point of outright dereliction of duty in such a dangerous location. She might have needed his help urgently.
‘We can use the Language to contact him,’ Kai said triumphantly.
Irene considered that. ‘I can make a construct and send it to warn him, but it will need to travel and find him.’
‘Magic,’ Kai said.
‘Not my field,’ Irene replied. ‘Are you any good at it?’