The Masked City (The Invisible Library #2)(74)
‘You’ve been pretending to be one of the Ten’s secret agents?’ Irene hissed in shock.
‘There are advantages to a city of masks,’ Vale said. Under his own mask, his mouth curled rather complacently in the moonlight.
‘I think you underestimate how efficient they are.’ She had to resist the urge to look over her shoulder. ‘They were following the Guantes as well last night, watching for suspicious behaviour. They nearly arrested me.’
Vale nodded, with a casual acceptance of the fact that of course she’d managed to avoid arrest. It was, in its way, a compliment. ‘In any case, I know where Strongrock was last seen, right before he vanished. It must be the entry to these Carceri of yours - or at least incredibly close. What I can’t do is conveniently infiltrate the place. I’d been planning to kidnap Guantes or his wife and use them as hostages, but it’s possible that I might have overreached there.’
‘But, together, perhaps we might manage something …’ Irene suggested. It was like the swing of a pendulum, from near-certain failure to an actual possibility of success. There were still a few hours till midnight. There might still be time to save Kai.
‘If we didn’t know where to go, following Lord Guantes would be a logical next step.’ Vale shifted his weight, looking meditatively down the canal ahead of them, at the glowing lanterns and windows that lined the dark waterway.
Their gondolier paused in his vocal rendition (the equivalent of June, moon, et cetera, in a pleasant if not opera-grade tenor) to call a greeting to a passing gondola. Irene eyed the boat nervously, but it held just another reclining couple, much like her and Vale. No soldiers. No inquisitors. No Lord Guantes.
She tried to think through Vale’s statement, rather than just reject it flat out. Guantes was on a very short shortlist of people she never wanted to see again. ‘You think Lord Guantes will check on Kai, to make sure he’s safe, now that we’ve escaped him?’
‘This is very likely, Winters. He’s also likely to set a trap. And our own goal will be fairly obvious, unfortunately - to find Strongrock as soon as is practicable.’
Irene frowned. ‘But won’t Lord Guantes expect us to follow him, as the only route to Kai? And be ready for us?’
Vale looked thoughtful. ‘If setting traps is his game, he’ll need time to do that and time to double-back and display himself prominently, to tempt us to follow. All this leads to what we were trying to do anyway - reach these Carceri first, and hope we are in time to find him, before Strongrock’s taken for auction.’
Irene was beginning to nod in agreement when it struck her that the sounds of the canal were changing. There was an ambient hush, a silence like a physical thing drifting towards their gondola, swallowing up lesser noises in its wake. She sat upright, pulling out of Vale’s protective arm, to see half a dozen shadowy gondolas moving towards theirs. The approaching boatmen were muffled in black cloaks and moved with inhuman smoothness, their oars barely stirring the surface.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
‘About turn,’ Vale said to the gondolier. ‘You’ll get a bonus, of course—’
‘There’s no bonus big enough to make it worth crossing the Ten,’ the gondolier said, his voice shaking. He brandished the oar at them threateningly. ‘You stay right where you are.’
Pleading innocence was not going to help. The question was: how much disturbance was Irene prepared to make in order to get away safely.
Quite a lot, she decided.
She scrambled to her feet and took a deep breath. ‘Canal water, freeze deep and thick!’ she shouted at the top of her voice.
Her words hung in the silence. Then their gondola came to an abrupt halt, throwing Irene to her knees. Vale grabbed her and pulled her upright again, steadying her. The silence was gone; the air was now full of the creaking of trapped wooden boats, and a bitter chill rose from the suddenly firm surface of the canal. The approaching gondolas were among the trapped boats, and the men in them seemed also briefly frozen in shock.
‘Will the ice hold us?’ Vale asked, getting to the point.
‘It’d better,’ Irene replied as she swung herself over the side of the boat: the ice groaned under her weight, but didn’t break. She hastily began shuffling towards the canal bank - the surface of the water had frozen in peaks and ripples, giving her feet some purchase. Besides nearly drowning, her boarding-school experiences had included dangerous adventures on semi-iced lakes, so it wasn’t the first time she’d done this. She steadied Vale as he nearly slipped. Crashes from the far gondolas suggested that their pursuers were finding it more difficult.
Under normal circumstances, crowds of curious bystanders would have been mobbing the bank, but the presence of the Ten’s own secret police had cleared the area very effectively. Irene and Vale scrambled up off the ice without anyone getting in the way. They’d gained perhaps a minute, but not more. And the black-clad masquers were scrambling across the ice towards them with more confidence now.
Time to slow them down a bit more. ‘Ice, break!’
Interestingly, the ice didn’t all fracture in the same way. Some of it crumbled into tiny fragments, sinking into the water like dust, while other pieces stayed in large chunks, miniature icebergs drifting downstream on the canal. The men on the ice dropped into the freezing water in eerie silence, but they were still struggling towards Irene and Vale.