Once everyone in this room is dead, Menchú translated. He hoped that someone else on the team had a plan. Because other than stall for time by keeping the Cardinal talking, he was fresh out of ideas.
Menchú took a breath to do just that—and smelled smoke. Surely Varano wouldn’t try to burn them out when he was inside the Archives. But no, it wasn’t bonfire smoke—just enough to stain the air. As though someone had put out a match.
The Cardinal’s eyebrows knit. “Is something burning—?” he asked the guard at his left.
The guard shook his head.
A wisp of smoke caught Menchú’s eye. He traced it back along its curving path to its source.
The wick of Grace’s candle was smoldering. Menchú was certain it hadn’t been before. And then, before his very eyes and without visible cause, it caught fire.
For the first time since that bloody night in Guatemala, Menchú believed in miracles.
After that, things happened very quickly.
The Cardinal noticed the flame, and his eyes widened—but before he could react, Grace caught the candle in one hand, and his wrist in another. She yanked the Cardinal’s arm down; their skulls collided with a thunk, and Varano slumped to the floor, blood streaming from his nose.
Liam jumped over Asanti’s desk into the fray, and Asanti threw books at whoever came into range. But most of the fight was Grace, moving like a whirlwind of poetic destruction: kicking and choking until the Cardinal and his entire complement of guards lay unconscious at her feet. She surveyed the room, burning candle still clutched in one hand, and turned to Menchú.
“Where’s Sal?” she asked.
Sal? Sal was right there, where she’d been standing this whole time . . . Except she wasn’t. “I don’t—”
“I’m here,” said Sal, behind him, as she emerged from the fallen stacks. She was walking slowly, and her arm was around . . . her brother? Who was clearly very weak, but—just as clearly—conscious. When did that happen?
Sal helped Perry sit, and he leaned forward against his knees, exhausted.
“Sorry,” said Sal. “He isn’t moving very well. I think lighting Grace’s candle from across the room really took it out of him.”
Menchú’s heart sank in his chest. Not a miracle. “Sal,” he asked. “What happened to Aaron?”
Sal gestured to Perry. “Everyone, meet my brother, Perry. Sort of. “
Menchú looked at the young man he’d first seen months ago in New York, playing host to a demon once again. He prayed that Sal had made a better deal than he had all those years ago.
Perry managed, with difficulty, to pull his head off his knees. “Charmed.” He spoke with Aaron’s voice.
Asanti blinked. “Oh, Sal . . .”
Sal looked nearly as tired as Aaron. “Please, can we talk about this later? When we aren’t surrounded by people who want to kill us?”
Somewhere above them, muffled by the closed door, a klaxon sounded. The alarm was followed by heavy pounding of booted feet above their heads.
“Good plan,” said Liam.
Asanti nodded to Perry’s exhausted body. “He can’t get us out the way he got us in. He can barely walk.”
Aaron struggled to his feet, and Menchú watched as Sal held a steadying hand under his elbow. Was she responding to her brother’s body, or the thing within? He wished he could say for sure. “Fortunately, I happen to know an alternate route.”
“What is it?” demanded Asanti, bristling like a mother hen.
“Did you know,” said Aaron, “that the original Roman water system connects to most cave systems in central Italy?”
5.
It was a very long, very dark, walk back. But, as promised, all sewers, then catacombs, then caves led away from Rome, and following Perry’s—or, Sal reminded herself, Aaron’s—directions, they reached the hidden cavern they had snuck out from the night before. Between the length of the journey and Menchú and Asanti’s confusion, she decided to believe Aaron’s assurances that no one else knew of the route they had taken. She didn’t ask how he knew about it. The Hand was pressing at the back of her mind, growing in strength and insistence, and she decided that she had other things to worry about.
Once they were back, Liam, who in spite of his antipathy for demon artifacts had insisted on carrying the shroud-wrapped Book of the Hand the entire trip, lifted one corner of the wrappings and pulled out Asanti’s silver pen case, which had been tucked inside.
“What on Earth?” asked Asanti.
Liam gestured for silence, and pulling out a multi-tool, carefully cracked open the casing to reveal a tiny chip and transmitter. He pulled the chip off the battery, and let out a slow breath.
Taking in the team’s confusion he explained. “This is how Balloon and Stretch found out about Sal. They bugged the Archives, and we all told them everything they wanted to know.”
“And you brought it back here?” said Grace. “They might be able to trace us with it. We should smash—”
Liam pulled the bug hastily out of reach. “It’s too small to transmit over any kind of range,” he said, only a little defensive. “Let alone through this much rock.”
“Yes,” said Menchú. “But why not leave it where it was?”
Liam’s grin turned positively wolfish. “Give me twenty minutes and I’ll show you.”
A short time later, Liam had hooked the bug’s central chip up to his computer, and they were all listening to a recording of the Cardinal’s unhinged rant about their team—crypto-racism, threats against Grace, and all, culminating in his plan to force them into coerced confession.
Menchú shuddered. None of that had been easy to hear the first time.
“Can you put that on the internet?” Sal asked.
“Sure,” said Liam.
Menchú shook his head. “No. You can’t.”
“But . . .” said Sal.
Menchú cut her off. “According to the rest of the world, magic doesn’t exist. Our team, the Society, doesn’t exist. Keeping that secret is the most important part of our job. I will not forsake my duty.”
Asanti put a hand on his shoulder. “Then we don’t tell the world. We just find the people who can help us stop Cardinal Varano and his co-conspirators, and tell them.”
“And who would that be?” asked Grace.
Liam had stopped the playback from the bug when their discussion started, but without warning, the speakers on his laptop crackled back to life.
A woman’s voice spoke, highly distorted but unmistakably that of Thavani Shah, the new commander of Team One. “Team Three. You are in rebellion against the Society and the Church. We have you surrounded. Surrender yourselves now, and receive what mercy you may.”
“Not an appealing offer,” Sal muttered.
“If you do not respond within twenty minutes, we will be forced to act. We do not wish to harm you, but we will if you do not surrender.”
Liam was typing furiously, and with a quick series of keystrokes broke into the feed. “Why don’t you surrender? Traitor!” he shouted back into the computer’s mic pickup.
There was a short pause. “Oh good, you can hear us.”
Grace let out a small groan.
“Surrender yourselves,” the voice from the computer said calmly. “If you don’t, my entire team is standing by, and I’d hate to make them go home without using any of the lovely toys they’ve brought.”
Episode 16: Siege
By Max Gladstone
1.
Father Menchú paced the ill-lit shadows of Team Three’s hideout.
Sal watched him. The strain of the last few days was showing: Menchú had never expected to shelter here from his own. Yes, no one in Team Three ever, exactly, disclosed the hideout’s existence to the Vatican, but that had been more tradition than treason. Menchú maintained the bolt-hole, but Sal doubted he ever planned to use it.
“We don’t have time for this,” Menchú said.
“Make time,” Asanti shot b
ack, as she chalked a silver circle on the stone floor. “The rest of us are working as fast as we can.”
“Team One is waiting upstairs. The Vatican wants us to give ourselves up. We have to run. Back through the tunnels, maybe—there must be some other exit between here and Rome.”
“They’ll follow us,” Asanti said. “Even if we make it out of the country, where would we hide? And we have the evidence we need: Liam’s pulling the Cardinal’s confession off the bug, and processing the Team Two database—”
“—but it’ll take a while,” Liam said from his workbench. “Devilish little bastard, no mistake. At least I’ve stopped it transmitting. Give me—” Sparks fountained when he placed a lead. “Fuck!”
Asanti continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “Sal won’t last long. We need her to testify, but the Hand’s regaining power. If we don’t banish it first, we might as well give her back to the exorcists.”
Sal crouched beside the circle. When she brushed the silver chalk, her fingers tingled, and a coiled thing in her chest shifted in uneasy sleep. The demon inside her did not like silver. She’d worked with Team Three for months, and the whole time she thought she’d felt irritated by the touch of silver because the metal was protecting her from evil. If she’d realized earlier that the silver was trying to protect her from herself, she would have spared them all a lot of trouble. “What’s the play?”
“You lie down in the circle with the book,” Asanti said. “We light the candles. Liam starts the pendulum. I chant. The words and cadence set up a harmonic resonance in your mind. That builds—if our world’s on a beach, and magic’s the ocean, we’re digging down until we reach water. The pendulum keeps time. When it stops, the ritual’s over. Ordinarily we could never do this with so few people, since the pendulum would stop before we got anywhere but—” She adjusted a coil of wire on the table. “Magnets really are useful, you know.”
Sal drew back from the circle. “That works? We can just . . . cheat?”
“We have no idea what we can do,” the Archivist replied. “Or what we can’t. If we had ever studied this formally, I’d know. But for the moment I have to rely on inside information.” She nodded toward the shadows beyond the circle of lamplight, to a figure Sal wished she did not have to see.
Aaron did not quite fit in her brother’s body. Sal did not know what she expected an angel (Spirit? Monster?) to look like, occupying a comatose man’s flesh, but Aaron still got it wrong. Not in any obvious way—her brother’s eyes did not glow, there were no wings over his shoulders—but she knew Perry and this was not him. She watched her brother’s hands chalk diagrams on the chamber floor, but they didn’t move in the jagged motions she remembered. She’d made the deal, she’d let Aaron into Perry’s body, but she didn’t have to like it. “We get through,” Aaron said with a voice that was not Perry’s, but sounded so close, a voice lightly shaded with Sal’s brother, “and then we close the book.”
“It’s closed already.”
“That’s what we thought.” Asanti paged forward in her notes. “When we met the Hand in New York, Sal closed its book, which should have cut off its influence on Earth. Yet it remained. Sal saw Perry’s soul imprisoned when she visited the demon world. Perry’s a sort of spiritual doorstop—the bond between his soul and his body holds the Book of the Hand open.”
“So we free my brother,” Sal said, “and suck the Hand back into the demon world. Free me before Team One bursts in.”
“Exactly.”
“I’m game.”
Father Menchú’s frown deepened. “Since Sal joined us, we’ve used magic three times, and each time we’ve failed, or something horrible has happened. We can’t risk that. We have to run.”
Asanti waved him off, and turned a page. “Rhodes was under pressure, and that turned out well enough.”
“Only because the Hand wanted the Codex Umbra as much as we did.”
“What about the Oracle, then?”
“It tried to kill Sal.”
“Because she had a demon inside her.”
“She still does!”
“Father,” Sal said. Menchú stopped pacing. The words Sal wanted to say were too hot to hold in her mouth. “The Hand won’t go back to the Vatican without a fight. That gives you two options.”
Liam reached for her, but she pulled away. If she stopped now, there’d be no starting again.
She took a knife from Asanti’s bag and held it toward Menchú, hilt first. “You kill me now, and maybe the demon goes with me. If we’re lucky. Or you buy me enough time to go through that portal and bring my brother back.” The priest stared at the knife as if she’d offered him a corpse. In a way, she supposed, she had. “I know what I’d rather do.”
He didn’t move. Neither did Grace, leaning against the wall behind him. Grace could cross the room and snatch the blade from Sal’s hand. Would she stop Menchú, if he took the knife? Would she take it herself?
Menchú closed his eyes. A year passed.
“Get ready,” he said.
He left the cave, and Grace detached from the shadows, deadly quiet, to follow him.
• • •
Thavani Shah waited, smoking alone by the villa’s front gate in the dark. She wore khaki trousers, a khaki shirt, and combat boots; she bore a sidearm and no insignia whatsoever. Streaks of iron gray shot through her hair; she wore it braided up and back from her face. Cigarette flame lit the blacks of her eyes.
The priest emerged from the villa and walked the long path toward her. He kept his hands in his pockets, and his head down. Streetlights glinted off his crucifix, and he still wore his collar. She counted footsteps on the gravel path. At twenty-three, he stopped, ten feet from her. He had, she thought, a fine mustache. “Corporal Shah,” the priest said. “I don’t see your legions.”
“You wouldn’t, Mister Menchú,” she replied. “That collar isn’t yours to wear anymore.”
“This is bigger than you know, Corporal. The Cardinal’s not the man you think he is. He’s covering for murderers in Team Two. Give me time, and I can prove it.”
“I offered you a chance to surrender. That was a personal favor.” She flicked ash from her cigarette. “My orders are to bring your team in. I’d rather do this peacefully.”
“You’re being played.”
“You’ll get your hearing when you’re in custody. In the meantime, I have my orders. Ms. Brooks is possessed. Your team stopped an exorcism to free her—and broke into the Vatican to retrieve your books and tools. You’ve gone rogue. You know what happens next. They call me.”
“Desmet and De Vos,” Menchú said, “are traitors, and torturers, and the Cardinal’s working with them. Your squad is a weapon in their hands.”
She dropped her cigarette and crushed its ember with her heel, then hooked her thumb through her belt. Her hand was not on her sidearm, but it was near. “Way above my pay grade, Arturo. I should bring you in right now, then root out the others.”
“Are you sure you can?”
The priest had not spoken.
Wind whispered through the uncut grass.
“Evening, Grace,” Shah said, without looking. She knew that even if she had looked, she would have seen nothing.
“Evening, Thavani.”
Shah didn’t bother trying to pinpoint the voice.
“I can prove my case,” Menchú said. “I have log files. Blackmail material. Eyewitness testimony. I just need a few hours.”
Shah stared at him, through him. “I’ll give you one.”
• • •
“An hour?” Sal had never heard Asanti’s voice rise quite that high. “Impossible. I need at least three. One’s barely enough to get Sal into the demon world, let alone for her to do anything once she’s there.”
“Shah’s giving us what she can,” Grace said.
Sal sat in the silver circle, holding the shroud-wrapped book. The ancient fabric scratched her palms when she tensed her grip. The book wriggled underneath, echoing the
Hand’s movement inside her, two malevolences burrowing toward one another through paper and flesh. “Send me through. Worst-case scenario, when they break in I’m stuck on the other side, with the book. They won’t have any evidence that you helped me.”
“Like evidence matters,” Liam said. “They’ll just burn us all.”
“You mean, like, in the spy sense, right?”
No one answered her, which was not reassuring.
Menchú pinched the bridge of his nose. “What do they have, Grace?”
“The squad’s gathered. Their conventional response team is gearing up. I didn’t see the reliquary yet. They scrambled to encircle us as soon as they had our location. The relics will come, though. The Cardinal will be all too happy to authorize their use against us.”
Liam cracked his knuckles, then his neck. “They’ll send the conventional team in first. Standard protocol. Don’t use magic if men with guns will do the trick. And women,” he added. “I can buy us time. The convies use GPS, electronic compasses, comms, telemetry—I can monkey with those. I stashed surprises through the tunnels, in case of just such an emergency.”
“You planned,” Menchú said, his voice somewhere between awed and furious, “to fight Team One?”
“Or the cops, or the military, or fuckin’ zombies, right? Man needs a hobby. I can hold off Shah’s boys until they bring out the big guns. Not much I can do against magic, though.”
“Don’t kill anyone.”
“They’ll be fine,” he said, and Sal heard the probably there.
Grace stepped into the light. Sal had seen her like this before: kindness, arch humor, and all the rest of her scoured down to underlying iron. “Once the relics come out, I’ll do what I can.”
Menchú raised his hands, then let them fall. “These people have trained with you. They know what you can do.”
“No. They really don’t.”
“All of this is touching,” Asanti said behind her podium, “and I love you all, but a few extra minutes won’t matter. I won’t send Sal through just to leave her trapped on the other side.”
Bookburners: Season One Volume Two Page 26