Irene held her fingers a fraction of an inch away from the window and focused away from the water, the darkness, the two men in the carriage with her, and into a world where language structured reality.
It was a fact that Alberich controlled and used chaotic forces. The chaotic forces must therefore be discrete and identifiable. But she had no words in the Language for these forces, and she could control only what she could name or describe.
However, she could name and describe herself.
It wasn’t a thing that the Librarians did very often. Oh, certainly if you had a broken left arm you could try saying, My left tibia is in fact not fractured but perfectly whole. But while your tibia might obey, your muscles would still be torn and any wound would still be open. Unless you could name every single thing that required naming, you would probably end up with a partly healed wound that would be more trouble than letting it heal in the normal way. While some Librarians went in for that level of detail, and were very sought after, Irene was not one of them.
But a person, especially a Librarian, could be named and described holistically as a single entity. She bore the Library’s mark on her flesh, and her name was in the Language. If she could enforce that strongly enough, deliberately enough, there would be no space for the chaos forces inside her. Without that to contend with, she could finally access her full powers as a Librarian.
This was not something she’d ever tried. Then again, she’d never been infested to this degree before. Only imminent death would force her to play with dangerous, untested, theoretical techniques; otherwise, maybe she’d have thought of this earlier.
Her life was far too full of learning experiences.
Before she could lose her nerve, she shaped the words with her lips, barely audible, speaking in the Language. “I am Irene: I am a Librarian: I am a servant of the Library.”
Her brand burned across her back as she enforced her will. But she felt curiously distanced from the pain, as though she could shrug it away and wish it gone. In a flash of insight, she realized that would be disastrous. What she felt in her was the conflict between self-definition and the contamination. She couldn’t afford to ignore it. She had to embrace it.
But it hurt. She heard her breath catch, the sound strange in her ears.
“Irene?” Kai said, his voice concerned. It was too dark to see him now.
With a racking surge, like vomit after eating spoilt food, the chaos power came jolting out of her. She tried not to think of the buffet earlier that evening (salmon, mussels, crab, soup, little prawns in sauce) and failed. The power spilled from her hand, boiling off her fingers in waves of shadow that rippled in the air—and like any living thing, it looked for shelter, for something like itself.
It jumped for the window, arcing through the narrow span of air, and crackled into the glass. Irene had just enough time to wonder if she should jump away from the window, when it broke.
Not just the window.
The whole carriage came apart. First the window, splintering into shards of glass; then sections of the carriage were toppling away from one another like a badly glued model. She barely had time to feel the splinters of glass in her arm before the water came in like a hammer-blow. And, surprisingly clearly in the near darkness, she saw Kai’s face looking strangely decisive. His mouth was moving; he was saying something—
She had several seconds of thrashing panic before she realized that she could breathe.
The three of them were drifting along together at the bottom of the river, enclosed in a long, continuous coil of dark water. It was a flexing, shifting, visible current in the river, separate from the rest of the water. It even felt cleaner. The shattered remnants of the carriage were already invisible in the shifting mud of the bottom, some distance behind them. Above, through the surface of the water, street lamps glimmered in hazy balls of white and orange. Kai floated a few strides ahead of herself and Vale, moving at the same pace as they were. He was saying something, but the river water filled her ears and she couldn’t hear him.
Vale grasped at her sleeve. He mouthed something that was probably What is going on, Miss Winters?
On the positive side, Irene reassured herself, he must be feeling more composed if he was back to calling her Miss Winters. She shrugged as obviously as she could, gesturing soothingly. It is all under control, she mouthed back.
Vale didn’t look as if he believed her, which was a shame, because she was now sure that things actually were back under control. To the extent that the three of them weren’t about to drown, at least.
No, the real problem was something else entirely. Now she was sure what Kai really was. A river spirit might have changed himself to water to save them, and a nature spirit of some other type might have cajoled or persuaded the river to help them, but only one sort of being would give orders to a river.
Kai was a dragon. What the hell was she supposed to do about that?
And he’d chosen to reveal himself in order to save them. Not himself: he would presumably have managed quite comfortably on his own. But them. Her and Vale. It was a commitment on Kai’s part that made her worry whether she would be able to answer it. She didn’t like commitments to other people. They could get . . . messy.
The tumbling rush of the current veered towards the far bank and then lifted the three of them out of the water itself, rising in an arc of
