Bookburners: Season One Volume Two

by Max Gladstone

  “I can help,” said a voice Sal almost mistook for her brother’s.

  “No,” Menchú said, automatically.

  “Are you crazy?” Liam said.

  “I,” Grace put in, “will cut you.”

  Asanti said nothing.

  “You have the right approach,” Aaron said. “But you don’t have the power. I do. It’s the least I can offer, after what you’ve done for me.”

  Sal watched the angel. “I thought you couldn’t go home again.”

  “We’re not going anywhere near my home. As far from it as possible, in fact.”

  Liam frowned. Grace held a knife—and she did not put it away. Menchú stared at Aaron, at Perry, in horror. Asanti, though—Asanti was still running the math, and she seemed to like the answers she found.

  “What are you waiting for?” Sal said to Aaron. “Get in the damn circle.”

  2.

  Sal held her brother’s hand, and did not. Back when the thing beside her lived within a tour guide’s body, a cut-rate Mysterious Figure in jeans and a company logo T-shirt, she’d wondered how Father Menchú could claim angels were terrifying. Aaron wasn’t terrifying, though he sometimes showed her terrifying things. But what was Aaron, anyway? He lived as a whisper, a dance of spirit in a tour guide’s blanked-out brain, then jumped from the guide to a Swiss Guard, then into her brother’s body, and each time stayed the same and each time changed. He hadn’t betrayed her yet, but the yet mattered.

  Though this touch, hand-in-hand in the magic circle, was a betrayal all its own, because when she held his hand, years of childhood memory screamed to her she held her brother’s.

  And yet her brother was not here.

  Asanti chanted. Sal tried to grasp the divisions between one word and the next, but the sounds slipped from her mind like small, smooth rocks through her fingers. The cavern walls throbbed with rhythm, or candle flame, or both. Resonant frequencies, the archivist had said.

  Beyond the circle, Liam reviewed his defenses from his laptop, activating hidden cameras and pressure plates. Beyond the circle, Grace prepared herself for battle. Beyond the circle, Menchú fetched equipment and adjusted dials as Asanti called instructions. They were fighting, she realized, for her, as much as for themselves. Even now, with the evidence they’d gathered, they could turn themselves in, and fight the Cardinal in council chambers. Maybe they’d have less chance of succeeding without her, but not so much less. They put themselves in danger for her.

  The words that spilled from Asanti’s mouth, the shadows licking the cavern walls, the staring audience of skulls, these lived, these breathed, these pierced the skin of language and small time into a part of the world that bled. The archivist’s voice did not change rhythm, but Sal did—the metronome in her mind sped up. Her muscles were cello strings and the chant bowed her.

  “Ready?” Aaron said, with a calm assurance she’d never heard in Perry’s voice.

  She could not speak. When she opened her mouth, solid sound rolled in. But she could nod, and did, and then she fell into the heart of God.

  • • •

  Shah was reviewing her troops when the Team Two emissaries arrived. She’d grudgingly judged her own soldiers adequate—boots shined, weapons cleaned and cleared, crosses in place, they hewed to their catechism like schoolchildren with a nun watching. As well they might. Shah had one hell of a ruler.

  The mismatched pair from Team Two did not belong. The tall one picked his way uncomfortably through her mobile command post, wheeling the round one in a chair. The round one sat, hands nested atop a wool blanket that concealed a stomach-turning tangle of legs. She’d worked with Desmet and De Vos for years, and still lost track of who was who. Presumably, they knew. Then again, with Team Two, you never could tell. In recent months she’d heard them called Balloon and Stretch, though never to their faces, and the names fit. “Gentlemen.”

  “Corporal,” the tall one said, and tipped his hat, as if Shah were some sort of lady. She didn’t dignify that with a response. “Good evening. Looks like you’re all set to go.”

  “Soon as the timer runs out.”

  “About that,” the short one said. His voice bubbled wetly, and he laughed, though no one had made a joke. Shah recognized the dullness of painkillers. Balloon took an envelope from his inside pocket and offered it to her. “New orders from the Cardinal.”

  “This isn’t the Cardinal’s operation, gentlemen.”

  “The Cardinal,” Stretch said, “wouldn’t dream of micromanaging. But this is a strategic matter. He wants you to go in now.”

  Shah nodded to the clock. “They have thirty minutes, and the reliquary isn’t here.”

  “They have a demon-possessed woman down there, and a critical artifact. If you give them as much as an hour, they’ll use both against you. Team Three has no intention of surrendering. Our path is clear.” Stretch stroked her chart table, checked his gloves for dust, then leaned back against the table. They wore black suits and white shirts. If one of Shah’s old instructors had asked her to describe the worst possible camouflage for a night battlefield, she might have settled on that uniform. “Go in now.”

  “I spoke with Menchú,” she said. “He seemed in control of his own faculties. And he had some very interesting things to say about your group—and the Cardinal.”

  Balloon’s mouth crinkled up at the corners. “Did you listen?” he asked dreamily.

  “No.”

  “Good,” he said. “Demons have a strong influence on the mind. They make people see things, say things. Believe things. Menchú might not be possessed himself, but the demon’s warped him with its lies. That’s why these people are dangerous. They’re strong in faith, and they have a monster in their midst, but . . .”

  Stretch picked up as Balloon trailed off. “Fortunately, we’ve just put the finishing touches on a new, better tool.” She wondered if they rehearsed, or they’d simply worked together so long that they lived in one another’s heads as much as in their own. She’d had a partner like that once, who died. Stretch reached into his jacket, asked her permission with his eyebrows. She did not shoot him, which he seemed to take as an endorsement. From his inside coat pocket, he produced a black metal cylinder with three needles at one end, and a red gem at the other. “The mark one demon detector. Be careful with that.”

  The gizmo weighed more than she expected. She held the gem to the light.

  “Press it to a suspect’s forehead,” Stretch continued. “If the crystal lights up, she’s possessed. Liquidate, with all possible speed. If it doesn’t, you’re in the clear. One shot, so don’t test it. Uses a saint’s knucklebone for a filament, and we don’t have enough of those lying around.”

  “Enough that we’re sure are real,” Balloon corrected. “Plenty of knucklebones in general, but few of ’em are authentic. We’re not making new saints fast enough to go wasting the ones we’ve got.”

  Shah frowned. “Why am I just hearing about this now? We could use it in the field.”

  “Mark one, like I said.” Only Balloon hadn’t been the one to say it, she realized. “Experimental technology. This is as close as we’ve come to a production model. This is an important case, Corporal. We’re pulling out all the stops on our end. Do your job.”

  Shah would have cursed if she thought it would make any difference. The two men waited, and didn’t even have the dignity to look expectant. She supposed they were used to waiting.

  She left her post. “Move up the clock,” she called to her aide-de-camp, and then, to the troops still checking their equipment: “Point team goes in five, people. Get it together.”

  Even in Shah’s few clockwork missions, the last few minutes’ deployment had been a scramble; so much more, then, when she was forced to speed up her timetable. No wonder, in the swarm of uniforms and buzz of gear, that she missed a brief exchange between Balloon and Stretch, left alone in the command post.

  “Saint’s knucklebone. Really.”

  “I thought it
sounded better than a battery and an LED.”

  “Amazing what you can do on the cheap these days.”

  “3-D printers are wonderful things.”

  “We’ll have to remember this trick.”

  “Oh, trust me. I think it has a lot of potential.”

  • • •

  Let’s orient.

  That great, unblinking, billion-pupiled eye—hurts to meet its gaze—pierces your soul and spreads like a surgeon’s calipers until you, staring into it, feel yourself naked and known, until you quake and weep and scream all your secret shames because it’s better to cry them out loud where anyone can hear than to let that gaze pull them from you—why not call that the sun, and the rippling skin in which it’s set, colorless and tense, name that sky. Oh, yes, the folly of it bends the knees, the joke’s in vomit-worthy poor taste, because the existence of those things you don’t want to call sky and sun makes you want to curse, to scream, to spit into that eye and plunge your fingers into its blue sclera and claw and claw until the jelly runs out, and by thinking that way, by pulling concepts like sky and sun over those horrors, you’re in some way kneeling beneath it, allowing it, surrendering to it—but what choice do you have?

  Don’t stare into the sun.

  You can’t fight something that large.

  Yet, Sal added, and thinking that, was once again herself, at least in general outline. She tore her mind from false sun and false sky. She lay on hard barren ground that wasn’t ground. She heard a heartbeat somewhere far beneath the cracked dry surface, and a periodic rush as of running water, and rejected all the other terms that suggested themselves for the thing like ground on which she sprawled.

  She tried to sit up. Ropes of grass had grown over her in the timelessness as she stared into that eye, and the teeth of its edges bit her when she pulled against it. The grass-blades’ tips, she saw, were forked, like tongues. They wriggled. Wind hissed through the dry field—she hoped that was wind.

  With a roar, she pulled herself upright. Tightening grass cut, but was not strong enough to stop her—she popped it free of the soil and ignored the blood that dropped from its translucent roots. She still held the Book of the Hand to her chest, good, she could move, yes, and Aaron—Perry—

  She almost couldn’t see him, because he was so bright. He burned, here, like an overexposed film elf, or a moth Icarused aflame. Things not entirely unlike wings sprouted from his shoulders and writhed against the ground; the grass that crisscrossed him seemed grown from ink. He let out an incoherent groan, and sank deeper into the not-really-soil.

  Sal swept the Book of the Hand through the grass. Inky strands parted. Aaron dampened back into Perry’s body, tore himself from the soil, and scrambled to his feet, sweat-covered, scared, and cursing. She caught him in her arms and held him until he stopped shaking, and dammit, that whole time he felt exactly like her brother.

  After a while, he recovered enough to draw back from her. He still stumbled when he tried to walk alone. “Thank you,” he said. “I could not.”

  Apparently the list of things he could not do included finishing that sentence.

  Sal laughed at the thought. This wasn’t the place or time for levity, but what other weapon did she have against this enormity but humor? “We’re fine,” felt like an even worse joke—or was that irony?

  “We have to find Perry,” she said. “Somehow. Any ideas?”

  “We could follow that,” he said, and pointed, shakily, toward her chest.

  Sal looked down.

  She hadn’t, yet.

  She didn’t think she’d been avoiding it on purpose, but—

  Worms of fire filled her. Beneath her parchment skin they writhed and twisted, and wove into a hand around her heart. More worms roped her to the book beneath her arm, and wound from the book out behind her over rolling mounds of something—not skin, not flesh, not a body, because no body could possibly be this large—to a tower of broken bone.

  Hello there, the Hand said.

  And then Sal realized the fire inside her hurt.

  She screamed, and fell toward waiting tongues of grass.

  Perry caught her—no. Aaron. Aaron caught her. Held her.

  “We can do this,” he said. “You can.”

  His tone turned a key in her spine. Her molars ground. She shoved him back. “Of course I can. Let’s end this.”

  • • •

  Shah’s advance squad did everything by the book. Despite an apparent lack of external defenses, they crept across the lawn, shadows rolling from cover to cover past the sculpture garden and the lake until they reached the villa. Entry occurred from the front and rear doors simultaneously, as well as through the garden window. They cleared the house in thirty seconds. Flashlights swept dark rooms. HUD maps worked perfectly, comms clear, thermals good to go.

  Flanked by two soldiers offering covering fire, the point man advanced to the double bookcase in the villa’s parlor, removed the Divine Comedy translation on the third shelf top left, adjusted a crucifix on the middle shelf, right, and swapped the positions of L’Aiguille Creuse and The Quantum Thief.

  Then he collapsed, the floor beneath his feet having become briefly but intensely electrified.

  “I thought you said no casualties,” Menchú said in the caves below. He watched the camera feed on Liam’s monitor, so he did not have to watch Aaron and Sal in the center of the circle. They were not precisely hovering, but they were not precisely lying on the ground, either.

  “He’ll be fine once he wakes up,” Liam said. “I can control the voltage from here. And then there were nine.”

  The advance team killed the power to the house and tried again.

  “And then there were eight,” Liam said. “Really, did they think I’d run my toys off the main grid?”

  “Don’t get cocky.”

  “Nothing wrong with a little joy in the Lord’s work, I’d think, Father.”

  The advance team got smarter—tore up the floorboards, found the power cables connected to the false door, and clipped them. Without power, of course, they had to pry the bookcases apart by hand, straining against hydraulics. They propped the doors with a couch and descended the winding stair two by two, three turns round into the labyrinth.

  They consulted the maps on their wrist displays, turned left, then right, then left again. Comms fuzzed out. Annoying, but not dangerous—visual contact maintained. Straight for a hundred steps, until a shaped charge collapsed a section of tunnel, trapping half the group on one side, half on the other.

  “And then there were—hmm, two groups of four? Doesn’t sound right.”

  The hindmost group consulted their maps: ”There’s a longer way around. We’ll link up at the seventh junction.” No one noticed that their maps had changed in the confusion of the collapse. There were many tunnels under the villa. And when the hindmost team turned one particular corner, a stone wall slid into place behind them, and their maps blinked off and on again.

  “And then there were four.”

  Menchú shook his head. “When did you install that?”

  “Hobbies, like I said.”

  The final four were harder. They noticed the trip wires. Liam caught one with a tranq dart to the neck. “Lucky shot,” he admitted. “But I’ll take it.” Grace rolled her eyes.

  But the last three avoided the trap door, and noticed the next time Liam changed their maps. He killed their lights and electronics, but they kept coming, feeling their way down tunnels in the dark. “Persistent bastards.” He blew the tunnel in front of them, at last, and they stopped moving. “As well they should. Can’t see, can’t speak, can’t trust the floor, can’t retrace their steps. They’ll hold tight for now. And then there were none.”

  “Not bad,” Grace said.

  “Not bad? Not bad, you say—ten of Team One’s finest out of commission without a drop of blood shed, just me at my keyboard, and not bad is the thanks I get. Why do you hate genius, Grace? Why not recognize a master in his own time
?”

  “Celebrate,” Menchú said, “when we get out of here.” He tapped the top left screen, the grounds surveillance. “Looks like the reliquary’s arrived.”

  “Well.” Liam closed his eyes and drew a deep breath. “Fuck.”

  • • •

  Sally, Sally, Sally, said the Hand as Sal and Aaron staggered toward the bone tower—staggered, because with every step the grass grew over their feet and twined up their ankles, and with every step they ripped it free. The uprooted blades trailed red fluid Sal didn’t let herself call blood. You don’t want this.

  “Pretty sure I do,” she said under her breath, hoping Aaron wouldn’t hear. He glanced at her, concerned—but without Perry’s edge of surprise.

  We make a good team, I think. We could work together. There’s room in this body for the two of us. Sort of.

  The tower of broken bone jutted from the flesh plane. Slit windows marred its surface high overhead, and red light burned beyond them. Within, she heard screams that sounded almost human. The cord of fire ran from her chest, through the book, and beyond, through the bone tower’s enormous closed double doors. “The Hand showed me Perry’s prison—and this doesn’t look anything like it.”

  “Our world doesn’t work like yours,” Aaron said. “You don’t have the right concepts for it. Each time you approach, your mind stitches the pieces it can grasp into a new fabric. The reality doesn’t change, but you can never see the reality, just images.”

  “How can I change anything, then, if I can’t see?”

  “How do you change anything in your world?”

  “There, I know what’s real.”

  “You don’t. You make models and approximations all the time. You think surfaces exist—they don’t. You think geometry’s real—it isn’t. You believe the person who went to sleep last night is the same as the person who wakes up in the morning.”

  “None of that changes how I live,” she said. “Geometry won’t help me save my brother.”

  Neither will he.

  “Trust what you see here, as much as you trust your senses back in your world.”