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‘You don’t seriously expect me to believe that.’
‘It’d make life easier for both of us, dear.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes.’ Bradamant smiled. ‘It’d mean that the mission was actually completed, for a start.’
‘And leaving aside any questions of your competence or my lack of it,’ Irene said, calmly, so calmly, ‘what could I possibly say to my supervisor?’ She was certainly not going to lose control, especially not in front of a student, just on this level of provocation. But she knew from bitter experience just how poisonous Bradamant could be, and there was always politics under the surface.
Bradamant shrugged. Her sheer garments rippled. ‘That, my dear, is your problem. Though your record is adequate, I suppose. You’ll just be facing a few decades of hard work to get any sort of status back.’
‘Wait just a moment,’ Kai said. ‘Are you seriously suggesting just giving her the assignment?’
‘She is,’ Irene said. ‘I’m not.’
‘I’ll take the student as well,’ Bradamant offered. ‘Dear Kai has such a good record.’
Irene could hear Kai’s suppressed intake of breath. ‘That won’t be necessary,’ she answered. ‘I have no reason to hand him over to you. Although you do have such a good record of dealing with students.’
Bradamant hissed. ‘Slander.’
It was Irene’s turn to smile. Bradamant might call it slander as much as she liked, but the facts were on record. The other woman hadn’t managed to keep a student for more than a single mission, and whenever there’d been a problem with that mission, the student took the blame. Unfortunate when it occurred once or twice, but a nasty pattern when it recurred. ‘No smoke without fire,’ said Irene.
‘How would you know? Keeping track, are you?’ Bradamant seemed disproportionately angry, taking a couple of impatient steps towards them, her heels loud on the bridge.
Irene smiled at Bradamant, making the expression as bland as possible. ‘Now why would I want to do something like that?’
The other woman sniffed, composing herself. She studied her fingernails. ‘I take it that you are going to be stupid, then.’
‘You may take it as you wish,’ Irene said. ‘But I am not giving you my mission, and I am not giving you my student, and if I were the sort of person who kept pet rats, I would not give you my rat. Clear?’
‘Very,’ Bradamant said coldly. She swept a spare swathe of fabric around her shoulders in a loosely elegant motion. ‘Do not expect me to be nice to you when I have to clear up your mess later.’
‘Oh,’ Irene murmured, ‘I’d never expect that.’
Bradamant turned without another word. Her footsteps rang on the iron bridge as she vanished into the dark corridor beyond, then faded into a heavier tapping of high heels on wooden floor, then into silence. ‘An explanation would be nice,’ Kai said quietly. He didn’t try to whisper and his voice echoed in the stillness.
‘It would,’ Irene agreed. She frowned at the dark corridor. ‘I wish I knew whether that was personal or political.’
‘You sounded as if you had personal history. Big-time.’
‘We don’t get on,’ Irene said briefly. ‘We never have. She gets the job done but she’s got a reputation. You wouldn’t want to work with her.’ She began to walk towards the corridor.
‘Irene,’ Kai said, and it surprised her in some indefinable way that he’d call her by name like that. ‘I get it that you don’t like her—’
‘I don’t like her at all,’ Irene cut in, keeping her steps calm and measured with an effort, not letting herself walk away from the conversation. ‘I don’t want my personal and very strong dislike of her to cause me to slander someone who is an efficient, competent, even admired Librarian.’
Kai whistled. ‘You really don’t like her.’
‘We dislike each other enough that she might have staged that whole little scene purely as a whim and in order to mess with me,’ Irene continued. ‘Except that it’d have taken a singularly unlikely set of coincidences for her to have found out that I was on a mission and to be here to intercept me. Which means politics.’ She stalked into the dark corridor, still a pace ahead of Kai.
‘So who’s her supervisor?’
‘Kostchei.’
‘Oh.’ Kai was quiet for a few steps. ‘Him. You know, I always kind of thought that was a bit of a dramatic name for him to choose, even for here.’
Irene shrugged, glad of the change of subject. It was true that Russian fairy tale villains weren’t the most obvious name choice. But then again her own choice of ‘Irene’ had hardly been dictated by logic. At least ‘the Undying’, the epithet usually attached to that name, was fairly accurate for a Librarian who’d made it to his age. ‘When we were students, some people spent hours trying to pick what they’d call themselves after they’d been initiated. They’d go round saying, “How about this one?” or “Do you think Mnemosyne sounds all right or is it too obvious?” or “I like Arachne, do you think it suits me?”’
