CHAPTER 21

THE RED LIBRARY

The Red Library was on the first floor of the house, at the top of an elegant staircase which swept up round the panelled walls of the entrance hall onto an upper landing covered in murky green and brown murals depicting a marshy coastline dotted with strange buildings and ships in distress on a dark, rising sea. The double doors to the library were, in contrast, covered in rich scarlet silk. Each door had a large animal outlined upon it in shiny brass upholsterer’s tacks: on the left a rearing unicorn, on the right a matching lion.

Lucy, having been roused from her doze in the kitchen, was feeling unnaturally sleepy despite wanting to remain alert. She looked at the seven-foot high animals and then at her ring.

“Yes,” said Sara Falk in French. “The same unicorn.”

“I do not understand,” said Lucy, looking around at all of their hands and the rings on them.

“Well,” said Sara. “It’s late…”

Lucy opened her mouth to protest, but Sara continued firmly.

“… it’s late and you must go with Cook and, if you wish, have a hot bath, but you must then sleep. Your eyes say you are exhausted, whatever your mouth might claim. Sleep, and then you will be in a better condition to understand things. But until then I will tell you this: the lion and the unicorn represent the one truth behind the great and hidden history of the world, and that is that there is more than just one way to see. View the world in one way, it’s a day-to-day place where wonderful things like lions are possible, but if you can see it the other way you notice it contains other realities, layers if you will, in which there are ‘impossible’ things, things like—”

“Unicorns,” said Mr Sharp, jogging up the stairs behind them.

“Exactly.”

“But unicorns don’t exist,” said Lucy, yawning despite herself.

“You’re right,” said Sara, exchanging a look with Mr Sharp. “At least as far as I know. But they certainly do exist as symbols.”

Mr Sharp pointed to her hand.

“You have one on your ring,” he said.

“Yes. But it is broken—” she began, her chin rising in defiance. He pointed to the animals outlined on the door.

“But when it is whole, like this, and faced with a lion, like that, it says the different realities do exist and are, like this lion and this unicorn, in balance,” said Sara, showing her ring. “And those who wear this seal are sworn to keep that balance.”

Lucy nodded, not because she fully understood, but because she was running out of energy and was filing all this away to be unpacked later. She had one final question.

“Why are the doors so red?”

“For safety,” said Cook firmly. “Now: bath and bed.”

“I thought red was for danger,” said Lucy.

“Danger. Safety. Two sides, same coin,” said Sara with a smile. “Balance, you see.”

Lucy yawned. She really was very tired. She wanted to ask more questions but Cook’s large hand was steering her towards the next flight of stairs, so she just nodded sleepily instead.

“Sweet dreams, Miss Harker,” said Mr Sharp. “You are safe and among friends.”

Lucy turned, remembering the rest of the question.

“But why silk? On the door?”

“My grandfather found a passage in the Talmud which told of the power of a red thread to ward off the evil eye,” said Sara Falk. “Thinking that if one single thread had such power, many must have much more, he decided to line this whole room–floor, walls and ceiling–in silk, which is of course woven from uncountable numbers of threads, so making it infinitely secure.”

“To ward off the evil eye?” said Lucy.

“Yes,” said Sara Falk as Cook steered her out of sight round the next curve in the stair. “Sleep well.”

Mr Sharp unlocked the door and pushed the lion part open.

“Of course she wouldn’t sleep any better if we were to tell her it’s as much to stop the evil getting out as getting in, would she?” he said quietly.

“She’ll sleep fine,” she said, pushing past him. “Cook’s hot milk has its virtues.”

He followed her in and locked the door behind him as she turned up the gas globes on the wall.

“Well and good,” he replied. “If she can stay asleep until The Smith gets here, so much the better.”

“She means us no harm,” Sara said as the light flooded the room, revealing walls covered in ceiling-high glass bookcases crammed with ancient leather-bound volumes of every shape, size and colour. The shelves were also lined in red silk, as was every visible surface not covered by a book, an artefact or a cascade of manuscripts. The ceiling was red, and the thick Chinese silk carpet beneath their feet was of the same hue. The shutters were closed on the tall windows and were also, of course, lined in silk like the doors.

There were tables down the centre of the room covered in books, papers and maps, and there were glass cabinets filled with an extraordinary mixture of objects: bones, weapons, jewellery, cups, idols, fragments of pottery and much more, all assembled with no visible rhyme or reason, but all, when you looked closer, carrying a handwritten label, tied on with red silk string.

In the middle of the floor, between two long tables, there was a blocky pedestal made of glassy obsidian so black that it was like a square hole sucking the light into itself from the four corners of the library. On top of it was a three-foot square wickerwork cage made from flexible strips of raw steel. An ornate key with a handle made to look like the flared hood of a cobra hung from the roof of the cage at its dead centre. As Sara walked past it, something hidden hissed at her, and she paused for a moment with her gloved hand stretched wide against the woven metal wall.

The floor of the cage was covered in black volcanic sand, and in one corner an obsidian urn had been half buried on its side, next to a shallow pool of water the size of a saucer. It was from the dark mouth of the urn that the hissing emerged, but it died down quickly, as if Sara’s hand was calming it.

“There is not much in the natural world that makes me shudder,” said Mr Sharp, pausing behind her and nodding at the cage. “But I will confess the thing guarding that key never fails to do so.”

“Put the bones over there by the Murano Cabinet,” Sara said, pointing at an empty shelf in a far corner next to an ornately panelled cupboard. The panels were covered in delicate paintings of Venetian canals, and each panel was outlined in twirled rods of hand-blown glass which caught the lamplight as they moved towards it. “And give me that damned blade.”

“I shall keep the bones for now, and try them with Jed’s nose,” he said, handing it over.

“I told her about The Oversight,” said Sara, looking at the cruel bronze edge in her hand. “I didn’t tell her how few we are, or how fragile the balance.”

“Or what power we must protect?” he said quietly. “I wager you told her nothing of that.”

“No,” she said, looking at the Murano Cabinet. “She has no need to know about the real key.”

“And who is she?” he said.

“The Smith will know,” she said. “And then I want to know who has been in The Three Cripples saying the Jew wants screaming girls.”

“There was a time—” he began, turning.

“That was before our time,” she said, cutting him off.

He watched her put the Sluagh’s blade on a red shelf in a glazed cabinet set on the wall between the bookcases.

“None the less,” he said calmly. “Old stories get repeated, and so the past comes back with a different face: it’s how the city builds its legends, out of misremembered realities and old wives’ tales.”

“My grandfather used to say that men always deceive themselves when they remember their own pasts,” she replied, “so why should a city be different?”

“Why indeed?” he agreed, pausing by the cage and looking at the small key hanging at its centre. “And what after all is wrong with a little deception?”

“In the right place, at the right time? Nothing,” she said. “But I would prefer a little clarification and truth about the night’s proceedings, and so we need to alert the others.”

He stepped to the door and unlocked it. He paused to look back at her.

“You’re sure The Smith will know who she is?”

She had her back to him, hands on her hips, scanning the high shelves above her.

“Wayland makes all the rings. He’ll know if anyone does. He’ll at least know who he made it for. And that’s a start.”

He watched her flex her back and roll her head from side to side, unconsciously stretching away the pain and fatigue he knew she always carried with her, but never spoke of.

“It’s on the next shelf,” he said.

“What?” she asked.

“ ‘S’,” he said, smiling mirthlessly. “For ‘Sluagh’. But now you need to go to bed. I will find Hodge, who is as ever on the trail of an interesting bitch, and send him for The Smith, and then, since you will have your way about the girl, I think I will go and ask the Sluagh some more questions, questions I should perhaps have already asked…”

“You have nothing to worry about,” Sara said, her voice soft. “I know I may betimes seem wilful and hard to govern, but I am no more a fool than you, old friend.”

He looked at her and shook his head, still not quite ready to smile.

“Since I am at present still cursing myself for a weak-minded idiot for letting you keep her here until dawn, that does not recommend you much, I am afraid.”

Silence hung between them, and then he shook himself like a man waking up from a doze.

“No matter. Hodge will not come in to make his report until breakfast, and then The Smith will be here and we can move forward.” He inclined his head to her in the ghost of a bow. “Sleep well and sleep safely, Sara Falk.”