A fold of spider-web fell across Irene’s face, and the sheer horror of having to drag it away, feeling the spiders begin to crawl into her hair, somehow yanked her back into sanity. Her horror turned from something alien and bone deep into more mundane human disgust. She needed a moment to speak the Library’s name and so invoke it. That had been the plan. Minimal and pitiful as it was, that had been the plan. But Alberich would know it the moment she began, and she had his full attention. She’d never get the word out.
Bradamant was screaming. No help from that quarter. And Vale was unconscious. She hoped. Better unconscious than dead.
Glass cracked and splinters from another display-case ripped into her dress, distorting into glass singing birds with bright claws and edged beaks. She flung her arm up to shield her face, and a glass bird lashed at her hand, thrashing wings leaving deep scratches. Blood ran like ink down her arm.
Of course. A language was far more than the spoken word, after all.
She clamped her hands shut around the squirming bird and fell to her knees. She could hear herself screaming in agony as the thing sliced into her palm and fingers, but it seemed somehow distant. The impossibilities around her were far more real and visceral than the pain. She dimly wondered if she was destroying her hand. Again. But set against her life, or her sanity, then the choice was clear.
Through her tangled, cobwebbed hair she saw Alberich raise his hand, perhaps to call up more horrors or deliver the death blow.
Alberich could have stopped her if she’d tried to speak. He ignored it when she drove the squirming bird into the soupy wood of the floor, as she scraped it along to create a long, blood-filled cut. He merely laughed as more debris came raining down on her shoulders from the now-unstable ceiling. But she needed an excuse to explain her actions. Something he would expect her to try.
Irene raised both hands, pointing the bloody glass bird at him. “Floor!” she screamed in the Language. “Swallow Alberich!”
The heaving mass of rotten wood surged round his feet, but he remained above it as if walking on water. “Let’s try that the other way around, shall we?” He laughed at her. “Go down and drown in it!”
She was already on her knees. She felt the wood slurp upwards around her legs like thick mud, sliding up to her thighs. It didn’t soak through the skirts of her gown like water, but pressed against her like hungry lips. She had a moment of panic—what would happen if her idea didn’t work? She let herself scream and, driven by the energy of that terror, sliced the glass bird into the remaining floor. And again and again, as she sank farther into the wood, as if she were trying to save herself. Her blood spattered onto the scored lines as the wood closed around her waist. The bird’s marks stood clear in the slowly oozing floor. Maybe because it was written in the Language, or just because it had to work or she was worse than dead.
“Beg me and I’ll save you,” Alberich said gleefully. “Beg me and I’ll make you my favoured student, my own sweet child—”
The cobwebbing covered her eyes now. She was working blind. But some things she knew even in the dark.
“No,” she said, and cut the final line into place. The symbol representing the Library itself showed clearly in the rippling wood between them.
The Library didn’t arrive like a roaring dragon or waves of chaos. But there was a light in the room that hadn’t been there before, more penetrating and clearer than the fluttering gas lamps. The spider-webs that had clung to her face and shoulders flaked away as fine dust. The Library’s authority pulsed through the room in a steady whisper, like pages turned in slow motion, and stability followed. The floor was now firm where Irene knelt on it, and the glass in her hand was sharp, but it wasn’t a living bird. The light even muted the horror of Alberich’s form, turning it to something seen as if through dull glass, retreating farther and farther away . . .
He was actually slowly withdrawing. The Library’s presence was driving him back, and though its touch felt welcoming to her, like a feeling of home, it was forcing Alberich away. And if the sounds he was making were any judge, his expulsion was pure agony.
He hadn’t quite finished with her yet, though. Blackness flared in his eyes and his open mouth. “You call this a victory, Ray?”
And then his back touched the wall, and he started moving through it. The wall thinned to translucency around him as he struggled, partly immersed, like amber around a prehistoric insect.
Then, as they watched, Alberich’s back arched, and he screamed—but this was on a different scale from anything they’d heard so far. Irene felt her heart lurch in unwanted sympathy as she saw the punishment that he was suffering. Alberich was crucified between the reality of the Library and the barrier that Kai had created outside, a squirming thing of chaos trapped between two surfaces of reality.
Irene realized that she hadn’t the remotest idea what would happen next. She didn’t know. She didn’t care as long as it got him away from here. There was no place for that sort of unreality in this world. It was abhorrent. What had he done to himself to become this? What sort of bargains had he struck?
“Release me . . . ,” Alberich choked out. Blood drooled from his mouth. “You can’t trust the dragons—they’ll turn on you as well—release me and I’ll tell you.”
“Don’t be an idiot,” Bradamant spat. She was pulling herself up off the floor, her dress in shreds, leaning on the wreckage of a chair to support herself. “Do you really think we’d let you go now?”
Thank you for
