The Masked City (8 page)

‘That’s quite a convoluted trail,’ Irene said thoughtfully. ‘Why not just direct him to the location of the kidnapping? Or simply try to overpower him inside a cab, where he wouldn’t have had room to manoeuvre?’

‘I think the point
was
to make the trail convoluted, Winters.’ Vale stared thoughtfully into the middle distance. ‘At any of those points, someone attempting to track him might well have lost his traces.’
Except me,
he didn’t have to say. ‘But as it is, I have descriptions of two people at the scene who might be these Guantes. A middle-aged man, slightly shorter than me, with grey hair and beard. He’s well dressed, with a commanding voice. The woman had black hair and was slender. She wore a mantle over clothing that was “foreign”, though my informant couldn’t say precisely how.’

‘And did both of them wear gloves?’ Irene asked.

‘Yes,’ Vale said slowly. ‘Both of them did. Though, to be fair, most well-off men and women would wear gloves.’

Irene nodded. That was true. But it still felt significant somehow. ‘Where did they take Kai?’ she asked.

‘That’s the problem, Winters.’ Vale looked annoyed. ‘The woman was escorted to a cab waiting nearby. I have the address to which she directed it, and I intend to investigate. But the man - apparently he left London by some Fae route. And he took Kai with him.’

Irene’s hands clenched in her lap, rumpling the folds of her skirt. ‘You should have said that sooner,’ she said. Her mind ran in circles. How to trace where he had gone? How to follow and rescue him?

Vale sighed. ‘Winters, let us leave the blame for some other occasion. What I need to know now is how fast you can find him and retrieve him. We cannot leave him in their hands for any longer than we must.’

For Vale, this was high emotion, and the urgency in his voice would have indicated standing up and stamping around the room in any other man. Irene had known that Kai considered himself to be Vale’s friend. She hadn’t realized quite as much that Vale considered Kai to be
his
friend.

Then again, she was the last person to judge people for keeping their feelings under control. ‘We have three main routes of enquiry that I can see,’ she offered, after pausing to think. ‘One is to trace the Guantes within London, here. Even if Lord Guantes has taken Kai elsewhere, we may learn something from the woman. The second route is for me to look for more information within the Library - and, if all else fails, I can approach Kai’s own family.’

‘How?’ Vale asked.

‘I can find out where his uncle, who was his guardian, is based - in the world where Kai was originally recruited - and go and ask for information.’ Irene didn’t like the idea. Nobody liked getting bad news, and she suspected that dragons liked it even less than most. But if anyone could find a lost dragon, then it might be another dragon.

Vale nodded, accepting her words. ‘I take it that your third idea is to ask Silver?’

‘It’s not an idea I like,’ Irene said ruefully. ‘Unless you can think of some way to apply pressure?’

‘It’s a matter worth considering.’ Vale rose from his chair to stroll restlessly around the room. ‘For him to be so vague in his warnings earlier might indicate that he is already under pressure from some other direction. Another matter worth investigation. But—’

There was a knock at the door. ‘Mr Vale?’ It was the housekeeper’s voice. ‘There’s a letter for you.’

Vale sighed. ‘Probably some futile request for my assistance. Excuse me a moment, please.’

Irene frowned at her hands, considering options while Vale’s steps rattled down the stairs. Being a Librarian didn’t give her any inherent abilities to track people across alternate worlds. She could travel from one world to another by going through the Library itself, but she would need to know where Kai had been taken.

There was an exclamation from downstairs. ‘Winters! Here, now!’ Vale shouted.

Irene caught up her skirts and stampeded down the stairs after him. He was standing in the doorway, an envelope and paper held carefully between his fingers. A sandy-haired messenger boy in a hotel uniform was cringing in front of him, clearly wishing he’d got away faster. ‘This fellow has news.’

‘What news?’ Irene demanded.

‘Tell us where you got this note.’ Vale’s hands were tight with tension, the lines of his knuckles and tendons showing - but he held the paper delicately, his fingertips barely brushing the edge.

The messenger boy wetted his lips nervously. ‘I work at the Savoy, sir. Gentleman guest there wanted it delivered to you.’

Vale nodded. ‘His name and appearance?’

‘He didn’t give his name, sir,’ the boy said. Vale bit back a sigh. ‘He was a gentleman, though. Had a beard.’

Vale sighed. ‘Very well. Here.’ He fished out a half-crown and tossed it to the boy. ‘For your time and effort. You may go.’

‘Should we be letting him walk away?’ Irene queried softly as the boy dashed off.

‘I can find him if I need to,’ Vale said confidently. ‘You saw how that uniform fitted him exactly? It was his own, not some stolen disguise. And the five buttons on his sleeve? He’s one of the senior boys at the Savoy, with a possible promotion to valet in the near future. His gloves were clean this morning, and his shoes were freshly polished. But he wasn’t able to give us any description, besides that the fellow had a beard and acted like a gentleman, which is probably why he’s still at the messenger-boy level. A higher-ranking employee would be expected to notice more than that, even if he didn’t talk about it.’

Irene nodded. ‘What’s in the letter?’ she asked.

Vale held it so that she could see it. ‘Don’t touch it,’ he advised her. ‘I am still examining it.’

It was clearly expensive paper. The slanting italic handwriting was in black ink:

Kai has returned to his own family. Make no attempt to see him again. This is the only warning that will be given.

Vale held it up to the light. ‘No watermark,’ he said. ‘The same paper as the envelope. I need better light to examine these.’ He was already heading up the stairs again to his room.

Irene followed. ‘It’s a fake of some sort,’ she said. ‘It cannot possibly be from his family.’

‘Oh? You are certain of that?’

‘Absolutely. I saw one of his family’s messages earlier. It was on a scroll, and in Chinese. Nothing like this. And if one of his people had come to collect Kai, it wouldn’t have been done by abduction.’ She could imagine Kai arguing, but she couldn’t imagine him being beaten to the ground and carried off by force. ‘Besides, you already said that you had evidence of Fae magic being used in his kidnapping. No self-respecting dragon would cooperate with the Fae. And most of all …’

‘Yes?’ Vale murmured. He’d thrown himself down in front of his laboratory table and was examining the letter and envelope with a magnifying glass.

Irene was pacing the room now, thinking it through. ‘If this had truly been the action of a dragon - perhaps one who felt that Kai was demeaning himself by associating with human beings, with us …’
More than that. Being our friend.
‘Any dragon who sincerely held those opinions wouldn’t bother to send messages. To you or me.’ She wondered if there would be a matching letter at her lodgings. There wasn’t time to go and check. ‘We would be beneath their notice.’

Vale didn’t look up from his scrutiny of the envelope. ‘Do all of them have that opinion then?’ His tone was academic, but there was something in the way he tilted his head that suggested a similar pride and hauteur of his own.

Of course, he’s an Earl. And an Englishman. And, most of all, the greatest detective in London. How could merely being a dragon compare to any of that?

‘I once met one who did. But he was courteous about it. There was a degree of, I suppose …’ She looked for the right words as she sat down. ‘
Noblesse oblige
. One does not cause unnecessary distress to lesser beings.’

‘How fortunate for us.’ Vale spun his chair around. ‘No watermark.’ He repeated his earlier comment. ‘Extremely high-quality paper, but not possible to identify it without further investigation. The handwriting is not one that I recognize. Added to that, I would not claim to be one of those people who reads character through handwriting, but the style is somewhat cramped and muted. I would suggest that the writer was attempting to disguise his or her usual script. The envelope was not sealed, so there is no clue to be obtained there. Your thoughts?’

‘My thoughts are more on the content than the context.’ Irene reached out for the letter, and Vale passed it to her. ‘And on the end result. Even if we weren’t aware Kai had been kidnapped, then we certainly would realize something was dubious when we received this. I think it’s a deniable red flag.’

‘A red flag?’ Vale queried.

‘An attempt to alert us that something is wrong, without the person in question admitting to giving us a warning.’

‘Ah.’ Vale nodded. ‘Lord Silver, yes. With that rather obvious dispatch of the letter via a bearded man, to point us in that direction.’

Irene nodded as well. Her shoulders were cramped with tension. She mentally reviewed possible leads. They’d squeezed everything dry for the moment. Which meant that she could finally act. ‘We need to move,’ she said. ‘I need to enquire at the Library, and to see if I can contact Kai’s uncle, if they have a way to locate him. And you—’

‘Will get onto the Guantes, of course.’ Vale rose to his feet, offering her a hand to help her rise. ‘And Lord Silver, while I’m at it. If the fellow is up to something, then I’ll know about it. Where should we meet?’

‘They’ll probably be watching my lodgings,’ Irene said with regret. ‘And they must be watching here as well.’ She frowned as her thoughts came together. ‘If Kai was intercepted at your front door, then they are certainly watching here, and they may be aware that we are both here now and comparing notes.’

‘Oh, without a doubt,’ Vale agreed. ‘However, our going in different directions should help somewhat - will you be able to reach a nearby library, do you think?’

‘I certainly hope so,’ Irene said firmly. There was a thread of satisfaction that he didn’t assume he’d need to escort her to deal with any trouble, or offer to do so. Earned respect from him was something she truly valued. ‘I don’t know how long I may be. I know it’s urgent. But if it’s difficult to reach Kai’s uncle … Should I look for you at Scotland Yard?’

For a moment Vale frowned, then nodded. ‘Go to Singh. He remembers you.’ Irene remembered him, too. Inspector Singh, probably Vale’s closest ally among London’s police. ‘If I have any messages, I’ll leave them with him, and you can do the same.’

He was still holding her hand. In fact he seemed to have forgotten that he was doing so. ‘Do be careful, Winters,’ he said. ‘Our enemies seem well prepared. If it were possible for me to accompany you, I would—’

‘But what you can find out here is more important,’ Irene interrupted. She would dearly have liked to have him at her back, and damn the rules about bringing strangers into the Library. But what she had said was true. They needed to know what the Guantes had been up to here. ‘And there’s no time to waste. I’m relying on you.’

His smile was thin, but present. ‘Then we had better not keep Strongrock waiting.’

CHAPTER SIX

Irene was almost surprised, and somewhat disappointed, when nobody tried to kidnap her on the way to the British Library. If someone
had
tried to kidnap her, at least she’d have had more of an idea what was going on.

But there were no mysterious hansom cabs waiting to whisk her off to an unknown location, no masked thugs dragging her into back-alleys, nothing at all remotely useful. It left her in a bad temper as she stalked through the rooms to the main Library portal.

The Traverse to the Library opened from a minor storeroom, one that used to be an office, and luckily there were no visitors around to see her entering. It was the work of moments to lock the door behind her using the Language, and she hurried across to the Traverse door. It looked like a store cupboard, and to any other user it
would
be just a store cupboard. But it was permanently linked to a specific door in the Library, and Irene had the linguistic key.