Once inside the room and with the door safely shut, Irene looked around guiltily. This had once been a well-kept office, with glass cases full of interesting things, or at least antique ones, and cupboards and shelves properly full of books. Now – after the silverfish infestation, her duel with Alberich and the fire – it was a wreck. The few remaining display cases were empty and shabby, and the scorched floor and singed walls stood bare and unattractive.

It wasn’t her fault. Not directly, anyway. But she still felt guilty.

With a shake of her head, she stepped forward to put her hand against the far door. In practical terms, it was a simple storage cupboard. But in metaphysical terms, it was a permanent link to the Library, just like the one that had gone up in flames, and only needed a Librarian’s use of the Language to activate it. ‘Open to the Library,’ she said. A queasy worm of nervousness twisted in her stomach at the unwanted but inescapable image of the same thing happening here.

As if to quiet her worries, the door swung open at once, without the slightest hindrance. She took a deep breath, not wanting to sigh in relief too audibly, and ushered Kai through, before stepping through herself and shutting the door behind her.

The room in the Library was familiar to them by now – one of the conveniences of using a fixed transfer point from an alternate world to the Library, rather than forcing a passage through and possibly ending up anywhere at all in the Library. The walls were thick with books, so much so that the black-letter posters warning Moderate Chaos Level, enter with care had to hang in front of them, for lack of clear wall space. As did the promised overcoats. Someone had installed a computer on the central table.

‘That’s new,’ Kai said, pointing at it.

‘Convenient, though,’ Irene said. She sat down in front of it as she turned it on, and removed the book from her coat. ‘Could you just check down the corridor? There’s a delivery point there, and you can drop this in and get it off our hands, while I’m sending an urgent notification about the gate. Coppelia or one of the other elders might want to speak to us personally.’

Kai nodded, taking the book. ‘Of course. Irene—’

‘Yes?’

‘What do you think that reaction was?’

‘I don’t know,’ Irene had to admit. ‘It wasn’t some sort of linked-chaos trap. At least, I don’t see how it can have been. There wasn’t anything linked to it that I could see – did you see anything?’

Kai shook his head. He paced thoughtfully, in a way that Irene suspected he’d subconsciously copied from Vale. ‘I saw nothing, and I felt nothing out of the ordinary. If I had done, I would have warned you. It didn’t even feel like a normal intrusion of chaos into that world – forgive my vocabulary, please, it’s the best way I have to describe it. If I were to guess—’

‘Which is an appalling habit, and destructive to the logical faculty – yes, I know,’ Irene couldn’t stop herself from saying.

The corner of Kai’s mouth twitched. On him, the streaks of ash looked merely like artistic dishevelment, the sort of thing a model would wear in a particularly outré fashion show. And on him, the National Guard uniform could have started a fashion. ‘If I were to hypothesize, then, I’d say that the problem was somewhere at the Library end, or between the two points. But I don’t know if that’s actually possible.’

Irene nodded, logging on and starting to draft an email report to her mentor Coppelia. ‘We didn’t come in through that gate, because it would have meant dropping into the middle of hostile territory and an unknown situation. That was why Baudolino brought us in via Sicily, and we had to go overland from there.’ Baudolino was that world’s Librarian-in-Residence, a frail man in his seventies and definitely not up to dodging revolutionary informers and handling a police state. Irene personally thought it was past time for him to retire to the Library, but it would have been tactless to say so. ‘And Baudolino himself can’t have checked up on it recently, or he would have fallen into the same trap – if we can call it that. So . . . I don’t know. I’ll just have to report it and see how that goes. And about delivering the book itself . . .’

‘Going, going, gone,’ Kai said, and the door closed behind him.

It took some editing for Irene to transform her first reaction. Which went something along the lines of We nearly got roasted, so I am raising the alarm, and if someone else knew about it, then why the hell weren’t we warned? This was a life-threatening malfunction! She eventually managed a more tactful I must report that when we attempted to activate the gate, we were the victims of high-energy side-effects, and I’m not sure that the gate is still in existence. But she did end with . . . The lack of information on the gate’s status could easily have caused a total failure of the mission. If Kai and I weren’t fully briefed, due to some issues in communication, then I must raise this as a serious problem for future efficiency and safety. Librarians are a finite resource. And if this is a new problem, then other Librarians need to be warned as soon as possible.

It was more management-speak than she liked, but it should get her meaning across. Irene sighed, putting her chin in her hands. Paranoia suggested that she had already been put on probation, and there was a direct line between that and being sent on dangerous missions with incomplete information. Common sense argued that she shouldn’t attribute to malice what could perfectly well be explained by stupidity, or at least by organizational mistakes. But there wasn’t anything in her waiting emails or in the Current Events bulletin about other gates going up in flames. So what could have happened?