‘That gives us two problems,’ she said. ‘Finding the letter – and this. There’s chaos behind it.’ To leave this door uninvestigated would be an open invitation for someone to come through and shoot them from behind.
Irene glanced sideways at Vale, saw the uncertainty on his face and made a decision. ‘You said we’d find eleven men here – and we’ve dealt with all of them. I’ll check this out while you retrieve the letter.’
There was a flicker of relief in his eyes. ‘I’ll call if I need you, Winters.’
He ran down the corridor, leaving Irene to stare at the mysterious door. Objects infused with chaotic power often didn’t react well to Librarians – and Vale’s broken cane served as an additional warning. Fortunately, with the Language she didn’t need to touch it. When she looked at it more closely, close enough to feel her nose prickle, she could see that there was something written on it under the grey paint, barely visible, totally illegible but indisputably there.
She picked her words carefully, not wanting to force open every locker and exit within the sound of her voice. If any others contained dynamite, that could see them both drowned. ‘Any bombs within the sound of my voice, deactivate. Door in front of me, unlock and open!’
It shuddered in its frame. Irene gritted her teeth at the drain on her strength, knotting her hands into fists as the tumblers in a lock audibly clicked open. The door opened towards her, but slowly, as if an invisible hand was dragging it open and it was fighting to resist. Irene peered through the gap.
A shadowed corridor lay beyond – formed of wood and stone, not slate and metal – and dimly lit by distant windows. It definitely wasn’t beneath the sea. She had no idea where it was.
Did Vale think that I was just going to stand here and look at it? Well, too late now.
Irene rubbed her forehead with the back of her hand, forcing herself to ignore her growing headache, and stepped through. The door pulled itself shut behind her, closing with a muffled thud.
She sniffed the air. Dust. Paper. Old cigar smoke. The floor was white marble, but even in the dim light she could see the dust that had settled into the cracks. The walls and ceiling were panelled with dark wood; paler rectangles on the walls showed where paintings must have once hung.
But all this was secondary to the tingling which spread across her back like poison ivy, radiating from her Library brand. She felt a sense of dread, suddenly realizing that she’d left Guernsey far behind. And not for a moderate-chaos world like Vale’s. This was definitely a high-chaos world, so she probably couldn’t reach the Library from here. And if she couldn’t retrace her steps, she’d be trapped here . . .
Beyond the window, a futuristic city sprawled out to the horizon, sown thickly with electronic lights under a shrouded twilight sky. The approaching darkness and glow from the lights obscured the buildings, reducing them to shadowy spikes or low shapeless masses. Some more distant structures seemed to curl gracefully upwards and outwards like living organisms, but they were too far away to see clearly. Tiny in the distance, Irene spotted the twinned lights of what might be vehicles – crawling at ground level, or drifting through the air.
Irene suppressed a curse. She’d hoped to identify the city, if not the world, by its architecture, but that was hopeless in the encroaching darkness. As for the climate and temperature, it was neither arctic nor tropical, but beyond that she couldn’t guess – or deduce – anything.
At the other end of the corridor, a thin rim of light outlined another door. She listened, but could hear nothing. Either the room beyond was empty, or whoever was there was silent. Or perhaps someone was lying in wait for her . . .
This was no time to hesitate. She tried the door handle.
It opened.
The room beyond had once been a lounge, high-ceilinged and elegant; it had gone to seed just like the corridor behind her. Tall windows in the opposite wall were covered by tattered curtains. The marble fireplace held a radiator rather than logs, and the bare lightbulbs that hung from the ceiling glowed unevenly, as though they might burn out at any moment.
Close to the fireplace, a man huddled in a battered armchair, a laptop resting on his knees. A cigar smouldered in one limp, gloved hand and the computer screen was blank. The man drooped forward, head nodding, on the edge of sleep.
It was unmistakably Lord Guantes.
She knew that man. She’d killed him. She’d put a knife into his heart, then watched his wife mourn over his corpse and promise vengeance.
She could accept alternate worlds, dragons, Fae, vampires, werewolves and magic. But now a part of her – the logical, rational part – urged her to run, to slam the door closed and escape back to the submarine base. Even if all the men there had been turned into lurching zombies by cerebral controllers, at least the threat was something she understood.
Lord Guantes had almost gained control over her, once. He’d nearly twisted her around his little finger and made her answer to his bidding. She would have been his pawn, his captive, his tool. Confronting him now was pure idiocy. She had no idea of his resources, how many guards he had or what snares might be waiting for her. Every instinct in her body screamed for her to get out of here. She’d learned what she needed to know. It really was him.
But if she ran, she would always be running from him. She might know enough . . . but there must be still more to learn.
Her mind somewhere on the scale between pure terror and stomach-curdling fear, she made herself say, ‘Lord Guantes, I assume?’
His head jerked up and he twisted round in his chair, the laptop clattering to the ground. He still looked just as she remembered: dark grey hair and a small imperial beard, deep-set eyes with the power to compel. His business suit could have come from any decade and almost any world, and the gloves that sheathed his hands were plain black. The left side of his face was concealed by a leather mask which started at his forehead and ended above his upper lip.
‘You should be dead,’ he said after a moment, his voice deep velvet, but with the old iron behind it. There was something in his eyes that took Irene a moment to recognize. It was . . . fear? He was afraid of her?
‘I could say the same about you,’ she said. ‘Clearly someone has made a mistake.’
At the back of her mind a clock kept counting down. Just because Lord Guantes was here, didn’t mean that Kai was safe. Lord Guantes could be working with – or for – anyone.
‘Fresh from an imploding submarine base and not even damp.’ He looked her up and down. It wasn’t the measuring glance of a martial artist judging her competence, or the deliberately insulting appreciation of a libertine like Lord Silver. It wasn’t even the cold stare of an assassin deciding how best to remove her. It was as if she was less than human – a paperclip, a crumpled newspaper, a disposable coffee cup – and he could either stand up to put it in the bin, or get away with simply throwing it to the floor. ‘What does it take to dispose of you, Miss Winters?’
‘A miracle,’ Irene said promptly.
‘According to Dante, thieves like you end up in the Eighth Circle of Hell.’
‘Dante placed “evil counsellors” like you in the next ditch along,’ Irene countered. ‘So tell me, Lord Guantes, what precisely are you up to? Besides trying to kill us. You must have some far grander plan than that.’