The Masked City (The Invisible Library #2)(82)

Kai looked at her, his eyes suddenly all black. For a moment the fern-patterns of scales were visible on the skin of his cheeks and hands, and the lines of his face were something inhuman and terrifying.

Irene returned his stare. ‘Pull yourself together,’ she said. It would have been easier to take him by the shoulders and ask him to be the man she had come to trust. But it would have been treating him as a human, and at the moment he was a very long way from that.

‘You have no idea what you are asking of me,’ Kai whispered. There was an undertone to his voice, deep and resonant, like the leashed boom of distant waves.

Irene was conscious of Vale taking a step back, but she would not look away from Kai, would not break their eye contact. ‘No,’ she said, ‘but I expect you to do it, in any case.’

Kai took a long gasping breath of air - and then something snapped and he was all human again, staggering forward to throw his arms around her shoulders and lean on her, his whole body shaking. Thunder shook the air outside, closer now. ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered, barely audible. ‘I’m sorry, Irene, I wanted to believe that someone would come, but I thought there was no way anyone could reach me here.’

The ground trembled under their feet. A slow, booming wave beat through the stone like a pulse or, Irene realized, like an alarm.

‘We have no time for this,’ Vale said curtly, a second before she could. ‘Can you walk, Strongrock?’

Kai pulled himself away from Irene, his breathing slowing. She patted him on the back, trying to be reassuring and mentor-like, rather than showing just how much she cared. ‘I think we’ve triggered an alert,’ she said.

‘Then we had better hurry,’ Vale said.

They stepped outside, and suddenly it became clear that the thunder in the air and the pulse through the rock hadn’t been some small atmospheric curiosity. Being inside the pillar had shielded them from the oppressive storm-wind that was now sweeping through the place. Tremors shook the ground. Irene had disliked the sterile quietness before, but this new brewing tempest was not an improvement. She quickly closed the cell door with the Language to cover their tracks, sparing a vengeful moment to hope that Lord Guantes would be shocked to find the cell empty.

Rocks fell in the far distance, and their hollow booming rang out across the landscape of bridges and arches like distant cannons. It felt as if the shaking was getting closer to them. No, she wasn’t imagining it. The shaking was getting closer to them.

‘We’d better run,’ she said, and they did.

Vale gave Kai a quick briefing on the last couple of days as they made the long trip back to the prison’s entrance. Irene put in a word here or there, but on the whole she saved her breath for running. It also gave her a better chance to scrutinize Kai. He seemed in reasonable physical health, with no serious injuries. His bruises didn’t look worse than a thug’s casual beating (something that had happened to Irene once or twice) - apart from the livid mark left by the collar around his neck. But he was still diminished. He lacked his usual self-assurance, his unthinking certainty that he was the most powerful thing in the vicinity. Possibly good for his health in the long term, but still … I wish it hadn’t happened. And I don’t know how he’ll hold up in a fight.

As they descended the flight of stairs, Kai spotted something. ‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘Can we pause for a moment?’

Irene followed his gaze. There was nothing there except a still pool of water. She couldn’t shake the feeling that it was intensely ominous, probably full of things with too many tentacles and too many teeth. Although nothing had tried to eat them yet.

‘Only a moment.’ Vale frowned; the rockfalls were getting closer. ‘The guards we bested will certainly have raised the alarm by now. And that noise, whatever it is—’

‘Either it’s an alarm,’ Irene said, ‘and we’re being pursued. Or I’ve fundamentally damaged this place’s nature by using the Language - so it’s tearing itself apart and the ceiling’s falling down. I’m not sure that’s much better.’

Kai knelt by the edge of the pool and cupped water in his hands, pouring it over his head. It ran down over his hair and in trickles down his shirt, plastering it to his body. He sighed in relief, closing his eyes and splashing his face. ‘It’s safe enough,’ he said, turning back to Vale and Irene as he rose to his feet. ‘I just needed to clean myself. There’s nothing alive in those waters.’

‘Or anywhere else in this place,’ Vale said. ‘Except for the prisoners, I fear. Do you think they could get free, Winters?’

‘It’d be stupid to have an alarm system that let all the prisoners loose when it went off,’ Irene said. A spatter of dust drifted down from the spur of an arch above them, and the pool’s surface shifted in long dark ripples. The instability was getting much closer. ‘Run now, talk later?’ she suggested.

The ground shuddered under them as they began running again. Pieces of the upper bridgework and pillars began to tumble from above, crashing to the ground in great explosions of sound and sprays of marble shards. It was like the slow unfolding of a nightmare, where the falling rocks and rising wind were always just behind them, forcing them to stumble onwards, their muscles aching, panting for breath, not allowing them to rest. They couldn’t afford to stop. Stonework was giving way less than a hundred yards behind them now, dropping pieces into the huge chasms. Distant shrieking came through the howling of the wind, as unseen prisoners cried their rage into the storm. All Irene could focus on was running, putting one foot in front of another, and on the exit ahead. They had to get out before the destruction caught up with them, or they were all lost. There should be only a couple of bridges now between them and the exit, and if they could just make it in time …