The Masked City (44 page)

‘No forgiveness is necessary,’ Ao Shun said. The rain outside was slacking off. ‘Your presence is most welcome. Will you be seated?’

He’s treating her as a respected ambassador, so definitely a step above me,
Irene decided.
But thank god that Coppelia showed up.

‘I’m only here briefly, your majesty,’ Coppelia said. ‘I’ve come to collect my colleague to answer a formal inquiry. I hope that won’t be inconvenient?’

Irene felt the colour drain from her cheeks. So she had to face a penalty for what she’d done. She tried to convince herself that she’d expected it all along, but it rang hollow. She wasn’t ready at all.

‘I have no reason to complain about her actions,’ Ao Shun said. ‘She has acted properly throughout, and I owe her my gratitude for what she has done.’

‘Madame Coppelia, you can’t do this!’ Kai had his jaw set, and the metaphorical bit between his teeth. ‘Irene did everything she could to get me out of there. It wasn’t her fault that I was kidnapped. If anyone should be blamed for this,
it’s me
.’

‘
Kai
.’ Ao Shun slapped his open palm on the arm of his chair. ‘Silence!’ But he seemed more astonished than angry that Kai should actually have had the nerve to speak. ‘If this is an internal matter, then it is not your place to interfere.’

‘I’m still an apprentice to the Library,’ Kai said, his skin starting to take on a draconic cast too. ‘Unless and until I am removed from that position, which was agreed by my father himself …’ He let it trail off meaningfully.

Irene tried to interpret the sudden look of baffled frustration on Ao Shun’s face. Kai’s father was his
older
brother. In terms of the draconic respect for hierarchy that she’d seen, this suggested that Ao Shun couldn’t contradict
his
orders. The situation was rapidly degenerating into a no-win one.

Someone had to take responsibility.

‘Of course I’ll return to the Library,’ she said. Ao Shun and Kai broke their mutual glare to look at her. She addressed Coppelia. ‘I admit I broke Library rules in visiting a high-chaos world without permission. I also acknowledge that I failed to properly supervise an apprentice who was under my charge, which resulted in him being kidnapped by individual Fae, and might even have led to war.’

‘These are serious charges,’ Coppelia said. Her voice was as severe as a hanging judge, but there was a glint in her eye that Irene recognized as approval. ‘Your majesty, I must ask for your permission to leave. Irene and I need to return as soon as possible.’

Ao Shun was frowning. He had Kai’s trick of glowering, now that Irene thought about it. ‘Is it necessary for her to return? Perhaps some detached duty could be arranged? I would not see her punished for her actions. I would even be glad to have her in my own service.’

‘Your majesty is too generous,’ Coppelia said. ‘Her actions are very serious. I’m sure that she herself wouldn’t want to avoid due process. Would you, Irene?’

She could throw herself on Ao Shun’s mercy and take up his offer. But then she’d also have to say goodbye to the Library - just as devastating as if the elder Librarians cast her out. Either way, she lost. She might retain Kai as a student that way, but she still lost.

Or maybe there was a way out of this that wasn’t
quite
losing. It depended on whether Ao Shun really did feel some sort of gratitude for her actions, and just how far that extended.

‘I’m not going to abandon my duty now,’ she said firmly. ‘My actions and my neglect could still cause war, threatening hundreds of worlds. I submit myself to whatever punishment is required.’

Vale seemed about to say something. She caught his eye and desperately stared him down, with a tiny shake of her head. If this huge gamble was going to work, then the threat to her had to be genuine.

Coppelia nodded. ‘I would expect nothing else. Come, then.’

For a moment the room was silent, then Ao Shun said, ‘Wait.’

‘Your majesty?’ Coppelia enquired.

Ao Shun’s expression could have been carved from stone. ‘I request, as a favour and in the interests of
justice
, that this Librarian not be judged too harshly. I can say with some confidence that there is no immediate risk of war.’

Irene took a deep breath of relief for those human worlds - and for herself. The sudden lifting of weight from her shoulders was dizzying. There wouldn’t be a war. She could survive a penalty - and it might not even be that bad, given what Ao Shun had just said. But then she considered the unbending nature of Library discipline, and her heart sank.

Coppelia gave a dignified half-bow. ‘Thank you, your majesty. This will be taken into account in judgement of her. Irene, if you have any farewells to make to your friends, please do so.’

Irene turned to Kai and Vale. ‘I’ll be back if, and when, I can,’ she said. ‘Don’t do anything stupid.’ It might not be quite the language that one should use in front of a king, but her control was slipping. And the shadow of the inquiry still hung over her.

Kai took her hands in his. ‘I will be waiting here for your return,’ he promised. ‘With my uncle’s permission, of course.’ The last bit was added hastily, and didn’t sound particularly sincere to Irene. Judging by the frown on Ao Shun’s face, it didn’t sound very sincere to him, either.

Vale touched her shoulder briefly. ‘I’ll keep an eye on Strongrock in your absence,’ he said. ‘I hope you won’t be too long, Winters. Your expertise with languages is surprisingly useful.’

Irene’s throat tightened. She was
not
going to embarrass herself. ‘Thank you both,’ she said clearly. ‘I hope not to be too long, either.’

And she did still have hope. Because Ao Shun hadn’t removed Kai from the Library, and because Coppelia had come to help her - and because, whatever the punishment the Library might level, she didn’t think they were going to cast her out. She was still part of the Library, and she’d spoken for the Library when things were at their worst. And, with the Library’s help, they had stopped a war before it could begin.

And because, in spite of everything that had been set against them, she and Vale had saved Kai.

She dropped another curtsey to Ao Shun and followed Coppelia out of the room - back towards the Library.

SECRETS FROM THE LIBRARY

Insider information on the Library and its spies

IRENE’S TOP FIVE BOOK HEISTS

As a junior librarian spy, Irene is sent far and wide to collect famous, rare and dangerous books and bring them back to the Library. This might be to doom a dangerous faction or to save a world - a librarian may not be told. Sometimes a book is exactly where it’s supposed to be, in a well-laid-out library on an orderly world, so it’s a simple matter to retrieve the required tome. Sometimes a mission goes badly wrong and the spy barely escapes with their life, never mind the target acquisition. Needless to say, librarians all have their favourite book-heist tales and horror stories. So we asked Irene to share her top five.

Agamemnon by William Shakespeare

I suppose the first text that comes to mind would be Shakespeare’s
Agamemnon
- everyone wants to boast about retrieving a unique Shakespeare, don’t they? It was one of those jobs where you know exactly where the text is (in a reclusive billionaire’s private collection) but the problem is getting it out of there. The world containing the book was still in the middle of a long-running set of wars, dating far back to some crusades in the eleventh century, and the Byzantine Empire was the dominant power. More obstructively, it was one of those worlds where women have a very defined second-class position in society. I ended up ‘borrowing’ a copy of Shakespeare’s
Love’s Labour’s Lost
from yet another world (it had never existed on the target world). Then I let that come to the billionaire’s attention. I allowed him to swindle me out of it, in order to get at
his
collection. I felt quite good about myself afterwards, since he had at least got his hands on a Shakespeare he’d never read before. As for the play itself … well, I found that Shakespeare had borrowed most of the basic plot from Aeschylus, the ancient Greek tragedian. But as usual Shakespeare had added in some bits of his own. I wonder if he had intended to borrow the rest of Aeschylus’ Oresteia sequence too and make a trilogy of it …

The Skjoldunga saga

The time I was sent to fetch a copy of the
Skjoldunga saga
is one of my worst memories. I was posted to a moderate-chaos, high-magic world, and there were idiots waving large weapons every time you turned a corner. Think flying longships, spell-singing skalds, and lots and lots of omens and feuds. Anyone who was anyone was trying to start new wars. It was as if they expected Ragnarok to be happening tomorrow and wanted to make sure they’d slaughtered everyone they could before it got apocalyptic. There was no helpful Librarian-in-Residence on that world. There were barely any libraries. And there were plenty of Fae. Worse than cockroaches. I worked as a travelling bard and storyteller, and recycled classic stories while trying to entertain over-muscled drunks in taverns. If you happen to visit that world and run across an oral retelling of Captain Nemo fighting Moby Dick while fleeing the French Revolution, now you know why. And the war that did get off the ground was absolutely not my fault. The Fae were involved too, and
they
were the ones who set off the Gullinbursti Bomb. I was just an unfortunate bystander.

The Light-House by Edgar Allan Poe

Another one that I had trouble getting hold of was Poe’s
The Light-House
, after the author’s demise. And the version I was after was the completed work, a full novel, unlike the unfinished version found in some worlds. Poe had been quite a famous writer during his lifetime in this world, though he still had problems with drinking and gambling. He’d lived in the American Confederate Empire, as it was called there, and his wife had been a practitioner of the local folk magics. While sorcery worked on that world and was a major subject in universities, most of the Fae in that world were over in Europe, so at least I didn’t have them to worry about. The problem here was that there was supposed to be a cryptogram concealed in the book. It was one of those ‘solve the puzzle and you shall receive my accumulated wealth’ scenarios, which led to copies of the book being very scarce (it had only been published as a limited edition, too). And several secret societies or obsessive treasure-hunters had made finding them even harder. I ended up being chased through the local woods by a large number of magically transformed killer cats, and having to dive into the lake to avoid them, and then crawling out on the other shore and being mistaken for a drowned ghost … Not one of my more triumphant episodes. And not my favourite way to spend Halloween.