“It’s all one to me,” Alberich said blandly.
Irene jerked her thumb at the door. “These are your orders, Kai. Out, and stay outside, and I don’t want to see your face until we’re done.” She glanced up at the window for a moment. “And don’t get any ideas about flying around on the zeppelins.”
Kai’s eyes narrowed fractionally, and she could only hope that he’d grasped the idea. “Don’t think I’m happy about this,” he said, shoulders slumping to the very angle of their first meeting. It had looked better in a leather jacket.
Irene nodded and turned back to Alberich. “The door, please.”
“Your name, please,” he said, with the same intonation that she had just used.
“I give you my word that I will give you my birth-name the moment Kai stands safely outside that closed door,” Irene said in the Language.
“Neat,” Alberich commented. “You think quickly. Room door, open.”
The door swung open, squashing silverfish in its wake, and thudded against the wall. There was nobody in the room beyond—at least, there was nobody alive. Just the huddled mounds of the few unfortunate bodies caught in the silverfish attack. Irene hoped queasily that they were just unconscious, overcome by ultrasonic waves or something like that. She couldn’t handle more deaths.
“If you hurt her,” Kai said softly, “I swear by my father and his brothers, and by the bones of my grandfathers, that you shall pay for this.”
Alberich regarded him thoughtfully. “What a curious way of putting it. I’m sure I’ve heard that somewhere before . . . Oh, never mind. I daresay I can dissect you later if it’s absolutely necessary. Out of here now, before I change my mind.”
Irene didn’t say anything, in case Alberich did change his mind. She gestured Kai towards the door and wondered how long it would take him to set up a barrier. And also how long she had before Alberich was finished with her.
Kai hunched his shoulders angrily and stalked out of the office.
“Close, room door,” Alberich said, and it slammed shut with another squelch of splattered silverfish, leaving the three of them alone together.
Irene felt the compulsion of her own oath like a noose around her neck. “My parents gave me the name of Ray,” she said, quickly choosing her words, before it could force out even more detail. The phrasing was more convoluted than it might have been, but it was true enough. “I don’t know their birth-names, so I can’t give you a family name.”
“Ray.” Alberich looked as if he was about to laugh. “And did they call you their little ray of sunshine?”
Actually, yes, they had. Irene raised her brows. “Is that relevant?”
“Not particularly, but I have always been a curious man.” His hand didn’t move, and the knife at Vale’s throat stayed steady. “Why don’t you know their birth-names?”
There was no way she was telling him they were Librarians too. And now she’d answered, she wasn’t bound and could lie as much as she wanted. “They always kept secrets from me,” she invented. “I’m answering your question as best I can.”
Alberich narrowed his eyes, and she suspected with a chill that he didn’t believe her. “Relevant questions, then. What precisely has been going on?”
She hadn’t expected that one. “Er, in what sort of detail?”
“There have been far too many people interfering in what might otherwise have been a perfectly straight-forward extraction. Believe me, Ray—”
She knew he saw her twitch when he used her name. She couldn’t help it. She hadn’t heard anyone use it to her for years. It was a childhood name, and she wasn’t a child any longer.
“—I didn’t ask for any of this,” he went on smoothly. “I would much rather have simply taken the book and left. No mess. No fuss. So I’m asking you, in a perfectly reasonable way, to stand up straight, stop stammering, and give me a full report. Imagine I’m one of your superiors.”
He could have been one of her superiors too. It was easy to imagine. They were diverse enough—such as Coppelia with her clock-work limbs or Kostchei with his thousand-yard gaze. But all had the same air of authority that Alberich was displaying. Other than that and the rumours, she knew nothing about him. She didn’t even know what he looked like. And he terrified her.
“Under the circumstances—,” Vale put in.
“Remember that I can and will freeze your vocal cords too,” Alberich said. “And your lungs. Unless you want to explain events yourself? In which case, Ray here becomes worthless . . .”
“I believe Miss Winters can handle this,” Vale said. “I will only interrupt if I have something important to add.”
He was probably used to coping while people held knives at his throat, Irene reflected savagely. “Allow me,” she put in. “I believe that the main factor here was that Wyndham knew too much.”
“Quite a claim, given how much Vale seems to know of Library business,” Alberich said pleasantly.
Irene decided to ignore that as she wondered how long Kai would take. And would she know when he’d finished? She needed to spin this out as long as possible, weave all her guess-work into a convincing narrative, and pray that Alberich would accept it. “Wyndham had connections with the Fae,” she started confidently, “but he also knew that Dominic Aubrey was a Librarian and, as such, opposed to the Fae. Wyndham knew the book was significant to Silver and thought that he could use it as a bargaining chip to gain something in return. Or he might have been taking some sort of complicated revenge. It was one of those Fae relationships. He decided to make sure that the book was somewhere safe while he negotiated. So he sent it under cover of another parcel to the Natural History Museum.” Could she persuade Alberich to go there to look for it? “And then he was murdered.”
“Oh yes,” Alberich said. “I arranged his killing. My agents didn’t find the book while they were there, but
