CHAPTER 26

Ao Ji’s face was blank, as impassive as a clouded sky: he might have been trying to process what had just happened, or he might simply be choosing not to share his thoughts. He turned away, his shoulders and back stiff and unbending.

Li Ming touched Irene’s shoulder, and the cold that had lapped around her faded. “Please leave us, Miss Winters,” he said. “There are matters we must discuss in private.”

Irene staggered to her feet. She knew that without her present numbness she would be shaking with released tension. But the part of her mind that reckoned political calculus decided Li Ming’s please was a positive sign. She jerked her head in a nod and began to move towards the door.

Then Ao Ji turned again, raising his hand, and a roaring wave of whiteness swept through the room.

Irene tried to blink. She couldn’t open her eyes. She was on the floor. She had fallen, somewhere between that moment of force and the terrible cold, and now. And she couldn’t get up. Her brain wasn’t processing things properly. It seemed to be stuttering, like a record jolting back over the same few notes again and again. She could hear wind and footsteps, and a distant shouting, but she couldn’t make herself focus on it. And she was so numb. Her cheek was pressed against the carpet, but she could barely feel the tickle of the fibres against her skin. There was some sort of weight across her back, a faint warmth against the surrounding cold, but even that was uncertain.

The sound of the wind rose. She forced her eyes open, but for a moment she couldn’t interpret what she was seeing. Where there should have been wall and window and paintings, there was now an empty hole, a gap leading out into the open air and whirling snow. Between her and the outside storm was a tall figure wrapped in snow, his back to her, light catching on his hands as though they were sheathed in ice.

He glanced back in Irene’s direction. Self-preservation seized her like a vice, and she let her eyes flicker closed, slowing her breathing to the minimum possible. It wasn’t hard. It was easy to relax into the cold, to lie there still and unmoving, to barely even think …

Light seared her closed eyes. There was a sound like thunder, and then silence again.

The noise of people shoving through the door was almost tame by comparison. There were too many voices. It was difficult to work out who was shouting what. She tried to open her eyes again, but it was harder this time. She was farther away from the room, farther away from everything. She was conscious of hands grabbing her, turning her over, someone’s fingers warm against the pulse in her neck, but everything seemed too much trouble for it to be worth waking up. Even the voices were unclear now, running into each other and blending into confusion.

“If you think I’ll let you touch her—”

“She’s going to die if you don’t let me—”

“Strongrock, if he can save her, then we have no choice—”

An arm slid behind her back, pulling her up to a half-seated position, and someone kissed her, lips parting against hers. How stupid, she thought distantly, that only works in fairy tales …

Raw urgent passion and need ran through her body like fire. She jolted in the arms that were holding her, abruptly feeling again, and her eyes blinked open to meet Silver’s. She was still cold—shivering, terribly cold—but she could think again, and she could move.

“You did it!” That was Kai. He tore Irene out of Silver’s arms, dragging her firmly against him. Out of the corner of her eye, Irene saw Silver draw back with a rather satisfied look. Which was more than she felt. Part of her still wanted that kiss. The stupid, physical, brainless part of her. She was aching all over, half-frozen, and her Library brand throbbed with her pulse.

“Well,” Silver said smugly. His eyes sparkled, and his whole body seemed to glow with warmth. Irene curled her fingers into fists to stop herself from reaching out to touch him and pull him nearer. “Sometimes the whole point of being a libertine is having a kiss which could bring the dead back to life. Or the nearly dead. Speaking of which, my little mouse, you’re welcome.”

“Thank you.” The words came with difficulty. Irene was still too busy cursing her own misjudgement. She’d assumed that Ao Ji would do the sensible, political thing when his guilt was proved—that he’d quietly make some sort of deal behind the scenes, or retire from the negotiations to be replaced by one of his brothers. Li Ming and Mei Feng must have thought the same. And they were now unconscious on the floor, and Ao Ji was at liberty to do heaven knew what …

She shivered as she realised that the weight on her body must have been Li Ming. He’d happened to be standing between her and Ao Ji at the moment of the blast. If he hadn’t …

Irene deliberately rejected the thought. If she wasted her time thinking about all the times she’d escaped death, she’d never get anything done. “Situation,” she said, shaking her head and making herself focus. “Situation report, Kai. Vale. What’s going on?”

Kai turned so that she had a better view of the hole in the wall. To be honest, there wasn’t much wall left. The hotel management was not going to be happy. “My lord uncle has left us,” he said, his voice clipped and controlled. “Li Ming and Mei Feng are unconscious, and likely to remain that way for hours. Unless Silver can wake them too?”

Silver sighed. “You have no idea how much I’d like to try. But I don’t think I could do it. A human or a Librarian, yes, but not a dragon.”

“Scratch that idea, then,” Irene said. She had a feeling of impending doom that was growing worse by the second. “Where’s everyone else? The Fae? The other Librarians?”

Vale went down on one knee next to her, so she didn’t have to stare up at him. “Your colleague Azevedo is reasoning with the remaining dragons, assisted by Mu Dan. I gave them the benefit of my own deductions during the pauses in your interview with Ao Ji. I think they are convinced, but I cannot say they are happy. The Fae are presumably still at the opera, or returning to their hotel, as are the other Librarians. And as for Ao Ji …” His gaze moved to the snow that was swirling into the room. “Is it my imagination, or is the storm getting worse?”

“It’s not your imagination,” Kai said.

Irene remembered what Kai had done on one of their missions. “Kai, there was that time with Alberich, when you warded a whole area against chaos. Would your uncle do the same thing? To force the Fae out of this world?”

“He might,” Kai admitted, “but in that case I’m surprised he hasn’t done it yet.”

“Yet?” Vale queried.

Kai shrugged. Irene felt the motion against her body. “He knows where the Fae are. It wouldn’t take long …”

Irene raised her hand to stop him. A dreadful realisation was shaping itself in her mind. She remembered her earlier words to Ao Ji: Our murderer is very direct, Your Majesty. He sweeps the board clean of evidence. They seemed to echo in harmony with Kai’s comment. He knows where they are.

“Kai,” she said. Her voice shook. “I apologise for asking you this … But if Ao Ji was the only survivor of this peace conference, would his account of events be believed?”

She looked up into Kai’s eyes and saw him make the same connections that she had.

He took a deep breath, then carefully released her, rising to his feet. “Irene, you need to get everyone under cover. I’ll reason with my uncle—”

“Out of the question,” Vale snapped before Irene could get her own disagreement in. “Strongrock, have you forgotten what he’s already done?”

It was kind of Vale, Irene reflected, to avoid directly saying have you forgotten he’s already tried to kill you, but it didn’t make a great deal of difference. Kai still winced. “I will do this,” he said through gritted teeth. “I have a responsibility.”

“You’ll get killed,” Irene said flatly, dragging herself to her feet. She swayed, and Kai put a hand out to catch her before she could fall. “Thank you. You’ll get killed, and the situation still won’t be improved.” She saw the desperate resolution in his eyes, the urge to take any sort of action that would let him escape from his current pain and betrayal, and tried to find some words that would get through to him. “Kai, your responsibility is to bring us all out of this alive! That’s what needs doing here.”

“The Librarian is correct.” Duan Zheng shouldered his way into the room, with Ao Ji’s human servant Hsien a few steps behind him. Hsien looked confused. Duan Zheng looked … calm. Past all despair, fixed on his resolution. “Your Highness.” He stressed the title. “Your duty is to the negotiations, and to your family’s honour. I will try to reason with His Majesty, and buy you what time I can.”

Kai hesitated. “As his nephew, I should be the one to try—”

“We’ve seen how little that means to him.” Duan Zheng’s curt words held their own shading of pain. He feels as betrayed as Kai does. Ren Shun would have been his friend too. “Hsien, you are to obey the prince as you would me, until some other person of superior rank arrives.”

He didn’t say anything further. He walked through the room, snowflakes whistling round him, till he came to the gap in the wall, and then he stepped out. Light flashed again, and he was gone, a golden dragon rising through the snow until he was lost to view.

“Your Highness,” Hsien said, bowing to Kai. “Your orders?”

Kai was still staring out into the storm, and Irene knew, without having to ask, that in a moment he would follow Duan Zheng, whatever the older dragon had said.

Someone had to take command in this mess.

“Kai,” she said firmly. “May I make some very urgent suggestions?”

Kai rounded on her. “I’m not under your command any longer,” he snapped. “If you think that I’m—ow!”

Irene had slapped him across the face. Hard. His hand caught her wrist, and she felt the bone-crushing strength of his grip. Redness flickered in the depths of his eyes.

“Pull yourself together,” she said softly. “Your job is to save your uncle’s honour by stopping anyone else being killed during this madness. I know I’m not your superior any longer. But I’m a Librarian, and I’m appealing to you as the ranking dragon representative here. And I have a plan.”

He slowly unpeeled his fingers from her wrist. “What’s the plan?” he asked.

Everyone else—Vale, Silver, Hsien, the people now crowding at the doorway—were looking at her in the same way. Expectant. Hopeful. Waiting for her to sort it out. Can’t anyone else have a plan? Why does it have to be my plan? It’s not even a very good plan, it’s as half-baked and thrown together in an emergency as Ao Ji’s own “kill them all and sort it out later” plan …

“His Majesty Ao Ji can’t manipulate the weather if the local chaos level is too high,” she said. That had, after all, been one of the reasons why a neutral world had been chosen for the conference—so that neither side would be inconvenienced or given too much power at the other’s expense. “So we need to find the Fae delegation and work with them to raise the chaos level. Right now. Before Ao Ji finds them first and … neutralizes them. And if one of the dragons could make a run for it, to find another dragon royal who could stop Ao Ji, that would be a good idea.”

“It wouldn’t work,” Mu Dan said, poking her head round the door. “If any of us tried to take on proper form and fly, Ao Ji would see us. He dominates the air at the moment.”

“Damn. All right. Next step, find the Fae delegation.” Irene looked around at everyone who was listening to her. “We all go and we all stick together. We may need everyone for this. And bring Li Ming and Mei Feng. We can’t leave them here.” Especially since they’re vital witnesses to Ao Ji’s guilt, and Ao Ji knows it. “Move, people, move, there’s no time to lose!”

In the hustling and running downstairs, she managed to find her way to Vale’s side. “Any further suggestions?” she asked quietly.

“No,” Vale said. “And I fear they wouldn’t listen to me if I did. I am, after all, merely human.” Irony laced his words. “At the moment, Winters, I think you may be the only person whom all three sides will listen to here.”

Irene muttered something under her breath that made Vale raise an eyebrow. “How do you plan to raise the chaos level?” he asked.

“With the Language,” Irene said. “And this is one of those experimental things which has never been tried before and I wish I wasn’t going to have to try now. So for pity’s sake don’t ask me if I’m sure about it. First of all we need to find the Fae …”

But as they stumbled into the hotel atrium, Irene realised that they wouldn’t have to go looking. Everyone else was just returning here, Fae and senior Librarians both. They were crowding in from outside, mingling with ordinary hotel guests whose enthusiasm for a night out in Paris had been dimmed by the sudden storm. She saw Coppelia being helped to a chair, stumbling with exhaustion, cold, and rheumatism, and for a moment she had a sudden delusion that she could hand over her responsibilities to the senior Librarians.

Then the whole building shuddered: the noise from above was like some great canvas being ripped apart. Irene’s imagination supplied images of a dragon’s claws ripping through the sky, even as she frantically tried to find some more plausible explanation. People screamed, fell to their knees, or ran in all directions. The atrium dissolved into a heaving mob. Over in one corner the Princess and Cardinal were surrounded by a solid wall of Fae and human servants, but the Librarians caught in the middle of the crowd were on their own.

“He’s hitting the place with lightning!” Vale declared, catching Irene’s arm and keeping her upright as someone else staggered against her.

“You can’t get lightning in a snowstorm,” Irene shouted, trying to make herself heard over the crowd.

“You can if you get the weather conditions just right!” Kai answered. “Irene, if we stay here he’ll bring the building down round our ears …”

There’s nowhere to run, no way to defend this place. Why didn’t we have this wretched peace conference in a fort? A castle? An underground nuclear shelter? We’re damned if we stay here, damned if we go outside—no, wait, that’s not true. With the snow as thick as it is out there, Ao Ji can’t possibly track every single pedestrian on the streets. But he could probably spot a group of Fae by their aura of chaos. So that won’t work. “Mu Dan, get a couple of dragons to help you carry Li Ming and Mei Feng somewhere safe,” she ordered. “Prutkov, Azevedo, get the rest of the Librarians, bring them along with me, explain as much as you can. Silver, Kai, Vale, with me, we’re going to talk to the Fae.”

The prickle of chaos was thick in the air as Vale and Kai forced a path through the crowd for her, as they headed for the Princess and Cardinal. Sterrington was with them, and Thomson and Thompson, and a dozen others she’d never been introduced to.

It was Erda, the Fae’s human head of security, who stepped forward to bar Irene’s way. “What’s going on?” she demanded.

“His Majesty Ao Ji has run mad,” Irene said. She looked over Erda’s shoulder to catch the Cardinal’s eyes. “I believe the Countess has somehow poisoned him. I have direct evidence of her interference. But if we don’t all work together to stop him, then we’re all dead.”

Should I be concerned about blaming the Countess, given how much she hates false accusations? Irene thought. Probably. But let’s worry about surviving today first.

The Cardinal might have chosen to look like a normal man for the moment, but he still had the presence of a Fae noble, someone who could twist human souls around his little finger with the greatest of ease. Yet when Irene said evidence, his eyes narrowed. “Are you sure?” he called from behind Erda.

“I’ve got proof,” Irene said, struggling with the urge to push past Erda, grab him by the shoulders, and shout it in his face. “And eyewitness testimony from the rest of my team.”

The Princess rested a hand on the Cardinal’s shoulder and smiled at Irene, her eyes calm and full of gentle patience. “Of course we’ll help,” she said, and the world was suddenly so much milder, so much more peaceful. It was possible to ignore the rolling thunder above, the sounds of collapsing masonry, the screaming of the hotel being evacuated. Not sensible, but under the spell of her power, so utterly possible. “Just tell us what you want us to do.”

“I need you all to focus your natures,” Irene said, “and we Librarians will use the Language to boost it. If we can raise the level of chaos in this world, then Ao Ji can’t sustain the storm or his dragon form.”

A bony finger tapped Irene on the shoulder, and she turned to see Coppelia. “Do you have any idea what you’ve just suggested?” the old Librarian demanded, as sotto voce as was feasible in the middle of a shouting mob.

“Pull yourself together,” Irene muttered. “You’re talking like a character from a melodrama.”

Coppelia made a sour face. “Blasted Fae and their narrative auras … Azevedo explained the basics. You realise that if we help them raise the level of chaos, then we’re putting ourselves at risk? It’s hardly our natural environment.”

“Neither is a blizzard,” Irene retorted. “And we can’t use the Language on Ao Ji unless he comes somewhere within reach of our voices, which he’s not going to do. What do you suggest? Climbing the Eiffel Tower and getting a really big megaphone?”

Then wind struck the side of the hotel like an explosion, bursting the windows and slamming the doors open. Shards of glass sliced through the crowd, but their screams were drowned in the howling of the gale. The lights trembled, flaring and jumping, and the room was a mad confusion of people who didn’t know where to go—upstairs, into the falling masonry and thunder, or outside into the blizzard—but who very definitely wanted to be somewhere else.

“Right,” Kostchei growled. He’d come up to stand at Irene’s shoulder. The whole mingled group—dragons, Fae, Librarians—were crowding into the corner of the room, as far as possible from windows and doors. “Give us the words to use.”

There was a growing sound of crackling from above. Irene was afraid it might be fire—but if it was, at least they’d probably die from the storm or the collapse before they could be burned alive, so all in all, things could be worse. She suppressed inappropriate laughter at the thought, filing it under stupid attempts to think about anything but imminent death, when in danger of imminent death, and forced herself back to the present. “I’d suggest ‘Chaos, increase,’ when I give the signal. Is everyone all right with that?”

There were nods. Not very happy nods, but nods. The Princess and Cardinal were nodding as well, and so were the other Fae around them. It was the sort of agreement that comes a second after you’re certain what your superiors want you to say. One of the dragons grabbed Kai’s arm. “Your Highness, are you sure this is a good idea—”

“Yes,” Kai said with all the firmness of royalty, all the assurance of his uncle. “The Librarians are acting with my permission. My uncle has been poisoned and is acting unwisely. We must stop him before he destroys the alliance.”

It would have spoiled the effect if she’d given him a nod or smile of approval, but she caught his eyes for a moment, and the trust in them—after what she’d done, how she’d forced his uncle to admit to murder—it twisted like a knife inside her.

Outside, through the broken windows and swinging doors, the whole sky was a mass of falling snow, so thick that it veiled the clouds beyond. A distant lightning danced through it, like threads of blue and green embroidery in white silk, and thunder rolled barely a second behind. Flakes blew into Irene’s eyes, and she forced herself to look away, to return to her duty. But for a moment she thought she could see a great serpentine form moving through the sky, whiter than the snow, colder than the winter, as elegant and perfect as a master calligrapher’s writing.

She raised one hand like an orchestral conductor and spoke in unison with all the other Librarians. “Chaos, increase!”