But for all her fury, she couldn’t move a muscle.
“A pity,” Alberich said. “I was really quite impressed with you. Bradamant was efficient but not remotely as perceptive. I’m afraid you’ve run out of time to decide, if there’s a dragon in the picture, but rest assured that I will remember you fondly.”
The door slammed open, and Alberich’s eyes widened as he saw who it was. He opened his mouth to speak, but three bullets in rapid succession hit him in the centre of the forehead. It was as neat and quick as a sewing-machine’s needle rapping down again and again. He staggered back from Vale, arms flailing as his skirts churned around his legs. He grasped weakly at the table, but no blood ran from the open wounds.
“Vale and Irene, move freely!” Bradamant shouted in the Language. “And get away from him!” she added in English. “I don’t know if that’s killed him.”
“It hasn’t,” Alberich said. “Gun, explode.”
Bradamant threw the gun aside just in time. It came apart in mid-air in a burst of metal and fire. She ducked at the same moment, moving for cover. Vale threw himself to one side as Alberich gestured. But a ripple of air tore into Vale and flung him into one of the display-cases, which shattered in a burst of glass. There was an ugly cracking noise.
Vale didn’t get up again.
“I really shouldn’t give people so much time to decide,” Alberich said. He ignored Irene as she stood, frozen. His Fae magic still held her, wrapped in chains around her name and spirit. “Bradamant, my dear, would you like to make a deal for the lives of your friends?”
“Only a fool would make a deal with you,” Bradamant snapped. She’d taken cover behind a large free-standing cabinet.
“Accurate but impertinent.” The holes in Alberich’s forehead were bloodless and unnaturally dark, with neither flesh nor bone visible. He raised his hand, palm towards Bradamant. “The greater lords of the Fae don’t manifest in their true form in the physical worlds. Do you know why?”
“Their chaos is too great,” Bradamant answered, her tone as sharp as if she was being questioned in class. “They would unmake a world.”
“Exactly,” Alberich purred. “And you wouldn’t want that.” The very air began to shudder around his hand. It smoked as if his flesh was liquid nitrogen, cold enough to burn a hole in reality. “And to prevent that manifestation, I only need one of you with your skin intact . . .”
Irene breathed. He hadn’t forbidden her to do that. And she was not going to accept the binding he had set on her. She was a Librarian, and while that made her the Library’s servant, it was also a protection. The Language was her freedom. Bradamant had told her to move freely. She could not allow . . .
and her brand was a weight across her back, a heavy burden, trying to force her to her knees
. . . she would not . . .
white-hot iron, searing into her
. . . permit him to do this. She refused to submit. Even if he was a monster, something that had killed greater Librarians than herself, she was not going to accept his binding.
Irene opened her mouth. The tiny movement of parting her lips seemed to take years as she watched dark fire blossom around Alberich’s hand. She sought for something to distract him, to give her time to invoke the Library. And it came to her in a burst of inspiration. “Jennifer Mooney’s skin! Get off that body now!”
And it did. In rags and tatters, like a piece of clothing being ripped apart along the seams. The flame around Alberich’s hand died, and he opened his mouth wide in a howl of pain. The dress disintegrated, falling apart like the pale fragments of skin. What lay behind it was so painful to Irene’s eyes that she had to turn and shield them with her hand. Behind the stolen skin, Alberich was a living hole into some place or universe that should not exist on any human plane. In that brief moment she had seen living muscle, tendon, and blood—but also colours and masses that left burning spaces on her retinas. She’d seen things moving that bent the light around them and shifting structures that made no sense. All her reality suddenly seemed as fragile as a curtain someone was about to rip through at any moment. Irene was aware that she was screaming, and she could hear Bradamant crying out as well. Yet behind it all was Alberich, his voice higher than any human’s normal pitch, screaming in pure rage and pain.
So that’s why he has to wear a skin, her thoughts rattled, as though the words could form a chain to sanity, link by link. So that’s why he has to wear a skin . . .
Alberich turned and pointed at her, and reality warped in the wake of his gesture. The wooden floor rotted under her feet, and mouths opened in it to gulp at dead silverfish and bite at her ankles. Thick knots of webbing dropped from the ceiling, full of spiders and drifting ash.
“They’ll come for you,” Alberich whispered. His voice had changed again; no longer female, or the voice of Aubrey, but something else. Something that hummed like the keys of an out-of-tune piano, just missing normal human harmonies to strike out a more painful music.
“You’ve hurt me and I’ll hurt you
