Ink, Iron, and Glass (Ink, Iron, and Glass #1)(5)
Either the onlookers did not know the house belonged to a renowned scriptologist, or they understood but simply did not find her argument compelling. Another of Montaigne’s neighbors came over to help drag her back. Frustration bloomed in her chest like a dark flower. She should not have wasted time on those other worldbooks, she should not have left without Veldana—if she couldn’t get the wall safe to open, she should have beaten down the wall with her bare fists and dragged the whole thing out.
The fire was spreading too fast, flames already visible in the front of the house through the sitting room windows. Her world was still inside, but there was nothing she could do now.
Elsa sagged in their grip, despairing, and they let go, returning immediately to a distance dictated by propriety. “The fire brigade’s been called for,” the first one said, as if this would be a comfort. He reached down to retrieve his top hat, which had fallen in the struggle. “Are you well now, miss?”
“What a ridiculous question,” she snapped, and turned away from him.
She knelt on the cobblestones beside what books she had managed to save. She opened the closest one and pressed her fingers to the pages, feeling for the familiar buzz of a live worldbook. There was a subtle vibration, like the rubbing together of a cricket’s wings, but it swelled and receded in a disturbing fashion. A finished worldbook should feel confident and solid, but this one was weak with fluctuations.
Elsa could feel the eyes of the crowd, as hot against her back as the fire itself. She had neither time nor patience for considering what they made of the situation—an angry brown girl in peasant clothes emerging from the house of their respectable, well-to-do neighbor. But whatever they thought, a crowded avenue was not the place to assess the extent of the fire damage done to the books.
Elsa pushed her sweat-damp hair out of her face and looked around. On the far side of the street, a black coach clattered by, the horses rearing and rolling their wide eyes in fear, the coachman shouting curses as he fought for control. When the carriage had passed, Elsa scooped up the books and stalked across the street, away from prying eyes.
She turned the first corner, putting a building between her and the curious gazes of the crowd, and stood in a patch of shadow between the streetlamps. Using her legs like bookends, she set the books down between her feet to free her hands, then took her pocket-sized book from its belt pouch. It wasn’t a proper worldbook so much as a directory of places—a means by which to target the portal device and open a door from one location on Earth to another. A heretical application of scriptology, by the standards of European science, but for Elsa it was an achievement worthy of pride.
She skipped past the core text in the front, where the book’s properties and functions were defined, and flipped through the destinations described in the back. Her hands shook a little as she considered where to go. Her mind went immediately to the one person on Earth whom she knew could be counted upon for assistance: her mother’s old mentor, Alek de Vries. So she found the page where she’d scribed a description of the canal outside de Vries’s flat in Amsterdam.
Taking out the portal device, she read the coordinates from the little doorbook, then tuned the brass knobs to the proper settings. When she flipped the switch, the dark disk of the portal widened, slicing through the very air of the alleyway—it hung there, unattached to anything, and even though Elsa had done this before, the sight of a portal with no Edgemist still disquieted her a bit. The real world didn’t work in sensible ways.
As she tucked the portal device back into its pouch, she heard the distant clatter of dozens of hooves and the creak of massive wheels behind her—the Parisian fire brigade, at last, arriving too late to do more than quell the spread of the blaze. Elsa let out a frustrated huff, hefted her stack of rescued books, and walked into the portal. She stepped through the infinite coldness and out onto a cobbled walkway tucked between a narrow canal and a row of looming four-story brick buildings all squeezed together like books on an overfull shelf. Amsterdam.
The portal winked closed of its own accord, and Elsa stepped up onto the stoop and shifted the books to rest on her hip, freeing one hand. She yanked down on the bell pull for de Vries’s flat, counting the seconds until he opened the front door.
De Vries was tall and skinny, bald on top but with the thick, cultivated mustache of a Victorian gentleman. He was wearing a burgundy smoking jacket, the velvet a little worn around the cuffs. Elsa thought of him as tragically old, though there weren’t any Veldanese older than about forty years, so she supposed she didn’t have much basis for comparison. In any case, he had laugh wrinkles around the eyes and frown lines between his brows, and at the moment the latter were the more prominent.
“Elsa, dear, what are you doing here? Where’s Jumi?” he said in Dutch, adjusting his wire-frame spectacles as if she might be some sort of illusion.
“A lot has happened. Let me in, it will take some time to explain,” Elsa said, smoothly switching to Dutch.
One of the characteristics scribed into the Veldana worldbook gave Veldanese the ability to speak a new language within minutes of hearing it—no fuss over grammar, no laboring to memorize vocabulary. Though Elsa had known de Vries since she was a baby, so Dutch felt almost as natural to her as Veldanese.
“Of course, of course,” de Vries said, holding the door open wide and running his other hand over his hairless pate.
De Vries reached to unburden her, but Elsa held on to the books and pushed past him up the stairs to his second-floor flat. Out of politeness, she waited at the top for de Vries to let them both in.