With the ease of practice she squashed the unhelpful thought that the problem wasn’t timekeeping, it was getting repeatedly drawn into these crises in the first place.

The stairs were made of the same slick black marble as the floor, and red lights glowed ominously from the ceiling overhead. While the stairwell’s stonework was unexceptional, the experience still felt somehow organic – as though they were making their way deeper into a living creature. Cables ran along the ceiling throughout, placed as unobtrusively as possible, but clearly added fairly recently. Irene gave Kai a quiet update as they moved ever downwards, alert for guards and other dangers.

Passages at the bottom branched off in three directions. Serpentine and reptilian figures were carved into the walls, emerging from the stonework like creatures from an ancient sea. In an unexpected yet extremely welcome development, there were actually signs on the walls – in Spanish – complete with pointing arrows. Irene found herself smiling for the first time that night.

Everyone else had seen them. ‘It must be a trap,’ Shan Yuan muttered.

‘If this was a normal place of worship before the Guantes took it over, they might not have troubled to remove the signs,’ Kai contradicted him. ‘The question is, which way do we want?’ He indicated the three marked directions: Crypt, Relics and Archive.

Irene waved Catherine forward. ‘Does any of this look familiar to you?’ she murmured, remembering how the first iteration of Lord Guantes had mentioned the ‘archive’.

‘Yes. It’s the Archive we want,’ her student confirmed. She indicated the third direction, the one with dolphins arching sinuously within their carvings as if trying to break free from the wall.

The dolphin corridor took them through several bends, heading further and further down, and the stonework seemed older as they descended. The ornamentation must have been added later – it was in Gaudi’s distinctive style, like the cathedral above, but these dark stones predated Gaudi by centuries. The air was cold enough down here to raise goosebumps on her bare skin, but it also felt dead and dry. They could have been stepping into the past as they walked into the depths of the earth.

The corridor finally ended in a heavy iron-bound door – locked, as Irene found when she touched the handle. She gestured the others to stand back. ‘Door, unlock and open,’ she told it.

Irene stared in delight as the door swung open and she saw what was on the other side. Common sense prodded at her to move, as she formed an easy target. But sheer relief held her in place, staring at what might be their way out of this nightmare.

She wasn’t looking at a few worn books chained to lonely shelves. This archive was a full-scale, full-blooded and thoroughly packed floor-to-ceiling library.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

‘Right,’ Irene murmured, stepping aside so the others could see too. The archive was a blend of ancient and modern. Leather-bound books shared shelves with modern ledgers, and computer screens could be found everywhere. Signage indicated some unusual categories – Theology, Witchcraft, Artificial Intelligence, Goetia, History, Heresy, Lives of the Saints . . . Some shelves were made of stone, some of wood. Others seemed to be constructed from modern plastics, metal, or some other artificial extruded substance – these shelves resembled crystallized oil. Distant fans kept the air moving, a faint whisper on the edge of hearing. There were no other sounds and no sign of guards, dark ceremonies or lurking nightmares.

She saw that the room was more than just a single space – it was a complex of spaces, separated by dark pillars like the ones in the cathedral’s nave. These pillars rose to the ceiling, where they branched out to form organic abstract shapes. Looking at them, Irene was reminded of the way tree roots wove around clearings in a forest. Clear white lamps shaped like strange flowers hung from the ceiling; they dropped between clusters of cables which had been fastened up there, well out of the way of the books and the floor. Irene couldn’t make out the far walls – but for all she could tell, this place extended the full length of the cathedral. Or even further. It might have been modified to echo the structure above, and had been filled with computers as well as books, but this place was old, very old indeed.

She felt wary, her instincts prickling uneasily. This felt like home. It was far too good to be true. Something had to be wrong.

Irene pulled herself together and turned to Shan Yuan. ‘I’ll get you out of here.’ This wasn’t his fight, and Kai would be relieved to have his brother out of danger. ‘Stand back from the door a moment.’

Shan Yuan’s eyes flared red and he made a furious motion of negation with his good hand. ‘Don’t be ridiculous! Do you expect me to leave you here like this?’

Irene bit back Yes, actually, I do, because she could see this would only serve to provoke him. Instead she said, ‘Your highness, it would be invaluable if someone knows where we are and what happened to us. I can’t send a Fae into the Library, Kai definitely wouldn’t go –’ Kai nodded emphatically – ‘and Vale’s still a prisoner and we need to find him.’

Though not all of that was entirely true. Lord Guantes had said something which had given her a half-formed idea about how to finally get Catherine into the Library. But she was still waiting for it to crystallize, hopefully into a full-formed stroke of genius.

‘It makes no strategic sense to send away a quarter of your strength while still in danger,’ Shan Yuan declared. ‘I think you are more intelligent than that. Now, what are your plans?’

Irene glanced at Kai, but his face was troubled. Clearly he didn’t want to put his brother in danger – but he could see his brother’s point.

She was about to suggest they start their search for Vale, when a murmur came from deeper in the archive. It was a faint ripple of noise, perhaps speech. But it was modulated like conversation, rather than a yell for guards or worse. Irene pointed in the direction of the noise, then touched a finger to her lips to command silence. Kai nodded and gestured that he’d take the lead. Irene followed, with Catherine by her side, and Shan Yuan at the rear.

As they edged past shelves filled with books and computer screens resembling blank reflecting mirrors, Irene was struck again by how abandoned this place felt. Lights burned – all night, apparently – and yet nobody was here to open the books or consult the computers. The Guantes had cleared this place for their own purposes – and then left the books unread, the archive unused. If she hadn’t already been so on edge and so terrified, she’d have found this depressing.

The distant voices echoed again, whispering past stone columns like tree trunks. They formed an irritated point and counterpoint – statement, question, pause and response. Kai’s eyes narrowed as he listened with his superior dragon hearing, and he turned to mouth Vale at Irene.

The light had too cool a quality for comfort. It was certainly bright enough to see by, but didn’t have the golden warmth of sunlight or lamplight. It illuminated their surroundings, picking out every individual book title, every angle of keyboard or screen, but it made Irene think of the light in a laboratory where infectious diseases lurked in sealed cabinets.

And then the voices came into focus.

‘You are a distinct nuisance.’ That was Lady Guantes. ‘You’ve attempted to escape five times now.’