The Burning Page

The lock clicked audibly and the door swung open, slamming into the wall behind it, but the way was still blocked. The doorway was filled from floor to lintel with crates. Someone had clearly piled them up outside – after setting the shotgun and hives, and locking and closing the door. Marvellous.

The dark swirl arrowed towards her and Kai. Irene flung her arms up to protect her face, a purely instinctive move, and felt burning needles jab into her hands. Crawling buzzing things, which she couldn’t even see clearly in the near-darkness, landed on her wrists and tried to crawl down the sleeves of her clothes. Flickers of motion touched her face, as vibrating wings brushed against her and tiny insect feet settled onto her skin.

‘Wind, blow these insects off me!’ she screamed.

She found herself at the centre of a mini-hurricane, which thrust away from her as if she was the centre of a sonic boom. It left her gasping, before she could breathe properly, but it flung the creatures back for a moment. Her hands burned with their stings, and next to her she heard Kai cursing. This was worse than seeing a pair of hunting tigers approach. Here in the darkness, unable to see what was attacking, locked in a room with these things . . .

It was a trap that had been set for a Librarian. Very well, she’d meet it like a Librarian.

‘Kai, down!’ she ordered, throwing herself to the ground as the things came buzzing back for her. ‘Glass, shatter! Glass fragments, impale the insects!’

She heard Kai hitting the floor as well. Then the display cases and lamps flew to pieces in a scream of breaking glass which almost drowned out the furious buzzing. Shards flew in all directions above her head, scything through the air. She kept her head down and covered, hoping against hope that this would actually work.

The noises were promising. Repeated thwips, like arrows, only on a smaller scale. Three heavy scrunching sounds, as if someone had dropped large bags of cereal. Then only a faint buzzing, still furious, but not so immediate. Then silence.

‘I think they’ve stopped,’ Kai said. His voice was muffled, suggesting that he hadn’t yet uncovered his head to look.

‘Right,’ Irene said. She forced herself to move her arms and look up. The floor was littered with the glitter of broken glass, intermingled with small things that still twitched and scrabbled, their little wings moving them across the floor in futile painful millimetres. Some of the insects still zoomed around the room, flecks of darkness in the shadows, but they’d retreated to the ceiling. The three nests were shattered masses where they’d fallen to the ground, jarred loose and weighed down by the amount of glass they’d taken on board. ‘Kai? How badly did they get you?’

‘Enough to hurt quite a bit,’ Kai said, coming to his feet and shaking his hands as though he could physically expel the venom. Which gave Irene an idea – but one better tried out of insect range. He was deliberately keeping his tone even, but Irene could tell that he was annoyed. ‘Of all the petty, humiliating ways to try to murder you!’

‘I’m not totally sure it was meant as murder,’ Irene said thoughtfully. She turned to the crates blocking the doorway and pitched her voice to carry. After all, someone might have double-stacked them to add to their trap. ‘Crates, move aside from the doorway.’

Her head ached a little as they slid sideways, but the Language worked much more easily here than in the world they’d just left. I never thought I’d be preferring a high-chaos world to a high-order one.

With her and Kai outside and the door safely shut behind them, she took advantage of the corridor’s lighting to get a good look at her hands. They looked . . . uncomfortable, to put it mildly. They felt hideously painful, but there was something about actually seeing the multiple sting wounds on both hands that left her feeling queasy. Or perhaps that was the venom. But she’d never get used to seeing her own injuries. ‘Kai, hold your hands out while I try something. Insect venom, exit my body and the dragon’s body through the wounds by which you entered.’

Clear liquid bubbled from the puncture holes in her skin, and she watched queasily as it dripped to the floor. Her hands still stung and ached, but it wasn’t quite as bad, and at least it wasn’t getting worse.

Kai frowned at his hands as the venom left them. ‘Irene, what did you mean when you said you weren’t sure it was murder?’

‘It could have been meant to drive us back into the Library,’ Irene pointed out. ‘Or repel any other Librarian who tried to get through. I don’t know. Add it to the list of questions we have to ask.’ Her hands seemed to have finished dripping venom for the moment. She shook them dry, and regretted not having any bandages. She also regretted shaking them. ‘Anyhow, priorities. We need to find Zayanna. And Vale. And Singh. And Li Ming, while we’re at it. And the fastest way to all of those is through Vale.’

And please let the Library hold on a little longer, she thought. And let Vale be all right.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

‘Thank God you’re here, Miss Winters,’ Singh said. He actually looked pleased to see her and Kai, which in itself worried Irene. As a general rule, the inspector tolerated the two of them, or at best considered them useful resources. If he was glad to see them, then Vale must be worse than she’d feared.

‘How is Vale?’ she asked, getting straight to the point. It was three o’clock in the morning and the street lamps outside were barely visible through drifts of smog. Here in Vale’s rooms the lights were all turned up high, viciously bright to her tired eyes, and showing no pity to the room’s clutter. The place was even more disarrayed than usual, with papers lying in drifts as though thrown there.