Unbound

by Jim C. Hines

  I couldn’t recall the name of the East Asian Regional Master, but I didn’t envy him that job.

  John pointed his gun toward my bag. “Where’s the blood, Isaac?”

  Moving as slowly as I could, I pulled out the telephoto lens. “You know about that, too, eh?”

  “What were you thinking?” John asked. “We’ve already lost one Porter to the vamps this year.”

  “I’m as human as you are,” I said.

  “So was Deb DeGeorge, in the beginning.”

  My hand shook slightly as I remembered the rush of magic surging through my veins and the voices of the dead whispering their secrets. It wasn’t magic I could shape and control, but it was magic nonetheless.

  My mouth went dry. I tensed my arm, trying to hide another tremor. I had no real need to hold on to the rest of my stolen blood, but I couldn’t force myself to hand it over.

  Lena tugged the lens from my grip and gave it to John.

  “Thanks,” I muttered. “Where are you planning to take me? Porter jail?”

  “You’re to be debriefed and kept under guard until this mess is brought under control. Pallas’ orders.”

  “Good.” Hopefully this meant I’d actually get the chance to talk to her.

  John hefted the lens. “How did you disguise the blood?”

  To one side, Ponce de Leon cleared his throat. “When you say we’re to be taken in, did you mean all of us?”

  I had almost forgotten he was here. His cane was hooked over his folded arms, and he rested one ankle atop the other. He blended into the background so well I suspected magic. A useful trick for someone who had spent so long trying to stay out of sight.

  “Are you with them?” John asked. “What’s your name?”

  Ponce de Leon said nothing. He didn’t have to. John’s face paled when he realized who he was pointing his gun at. He stepped back and raised his wrist to his mouth, speaking into what looked like an old-style spy communicator watch. “Uh, we may have a problem here.”

  Ponce de Leon merely smiled.

  I would have dearly loved to see what happened next. Unfortunately, that was when someone shot me in the back with some kind of stun beam. Energy seared my nervous system, and everything went black.

  I awoke on a ridiculously comfortable bed. I rolled onto my stomach, and my right arm brushed warm flesh.

  “Good morning.” Lena’s voice came from somewhere past my feet. I frowned and opened my eyes.

  Nidhi Shah was sprawled on the bed next to me, snoring quietly. I planted my face in the pillow. My head was pounding like a flat tire going down a dirt road. “Where are we?”

  Lena understood my muffled question. “Chicago, I think.”

  “Ponce de Leon?”

  “I only woke up a half hour ago. I haven’t seen him.”

  I sat up and looked around. Nidhi and I were in a queen-sized bed in the center of a small but well-furnished bedroom. Oak bookshelves lined one wall. To the right, blue curtains covered the windows. A wooden ceiling fan hummed quietly overhead.

  Nicola Pallas lived in the Chicago area, but I didn’t think this was her place. The air lacked the musty blood-and-fur smell of her beloved chupacabra hybrids.

  I climbed out of bed, trying not to disturb Nidhi. Smudge was in his cage on an antique bedside table. My shoes sat neatly beside a wooden door, alongside Nidhi’s and Lena’s. I checked my back pocket and swore. The poem I had been working on was gone.

  I tried the door, which was locked, then slid open a small closet with folding doors. An assortment of robes, shirts, and pants hung on wooden hangers. Wherever we were, there was plenty of wood Lena could use for weapons, if it came to that. I started toward the window.

  “Brace yourself,” Lena warned.

  I peered out and swallowed. We were at least thirty stories up, and perhaps a block from the waterfront. You’d think a trip into orbit and back would have made it easier for me to handle heights, but if anything, the vertigo was worse. I forced myself to inspect the windows, but they weren’t designed to open. Even if they did, there was no fire escape. We weren’t getting out this way. Lena might survive a jump from this height, but it would hurt, and I doubted she’d be getting up and walking away.

  I turned to let Smudge out of his cage. He scampered up my arm and perched on my shoulder. He was no warmer than usual, suggesting we were in no immediate danger. “What happened after they shot me?”

  “They shot the rest of us.” Lena shrugged. “I’m pretty sure Ponce de Leon just laughed it off, but Nidhi and I . . .”

  “There’s always a silver lining,” Nidhi said, not opening her eyes. “Isaac desperately needed the sleep.”

  “They probably did their initial interrogation while we were out,” I guessed. Neither Lena nor I had any defenses against mind reading. A tattoo on Nidhi’s temple, the Gujarati characters for balance, was supposed to grant her some protection against mental assaults, but since the Porters were the ones who had given her that tattoo, I wasn’t counting on it.

  I returned to the door and listened, but heard nothing from the other side. I knocked hard. “I’d like to order room service, please!”

  There was no answer. I turned around, surveying the room more closely. Lena could fashion those coat hangers into something strong enough to smash the window. A couple of knotted sheets would let us go down one floor and break in through another window. If we were fast enough—and assuming nobody lost their grip and plummeted to their death—we might be able to pull it off. Especially if Lena sealed the door to slow pursuit.

  The door opened before I could share my plan, which was probably for the best. Nicola Pallas stepped inside. She was alone and appeared unarmed, though in her case, appearances were deceptive as hell. Nicola could probably hum a tune and make me run headfirst into the window until it broke or I knocked myself unconscious, whichever came first.

  She looked . . . twitchy was the best word I could find. Her hands were in constant motion, the fingers dancing to and fro. She shut the door and immediately began pacing the room, like she would collapse if she stopped moving. I couldn’t tell whether her manic energy was from overstimulation and stress or simple overuse of magic, if not both.

  She wore an unbuttoned denim shirt over a red turtleneck, with black corduroys. Her black hair was pulled into a short, fat ponytail. The lines by her eyes appeared deeper than the last time I had seen her.

  “Are we prisoners?” Nidhi asked bluntly.

  “Yes,” said Nicola.

  “For how long?” I pointed to Lena. “She’s a dryad, remember? Keeping her away from her tree for too long could kill her. Or are you planning to transplant her oak to the apartment, too?”

  “We considered it.”

  “Who is ‘we’?” asked Lena.

  She ignored the question. “Doctor Karim warned us that you wouldn’t be able to let go. Not that I expected you to. But none of us knew how far you would go. Mahefa Issoufaly? That man is a known murderer.”

  Doctor Karim had been my therapist for that too-brief stretch when I worked as a Porter researcher. The last I had heard from her was when she stopped by my house to conduct a half-hour “exit interview” after Gutenberg stole my magic and kicked me out. “Then why haven’t the Porters done something about him?”

  “He’s one of many individuals on our watch list, but we have other priorities as of late. Like bringing you in so we could protect you.”

  “And because you need to know what Gerbert d’Aurillac told me,” I said.

  “That’s correct.” Nicola sang as she spoke, a weird, wordless undertone that made me wonder if she had given herself a second set of vocal cords. “Do you know how to use the poem d’Aurillac shared with you?”

  “You know I don’t.”

  “Not consciously, no.” She continued to sing. “I’m trying to help you, Isaac. To sharpen your thoughts and insights.”

  After being shot and dragged to Chicago, I wasn’t in the mood to cooperate, but N
icola’s song didn’t give me much choice. The words flowed like water through a cracked dam. “From what I saw, he used it like some kind of portal. He put the armillary sphere—Meridiana’s prison—inside, then burned the poem. Like sealing off a tunnel behind you. I’m hoping that if you rewrite the poem, you can use it to retrieve the sphere. I can’t consciously remember all the details. The words just come to me when I write. I think he wanted me to recreate it.” I studied my hands, remembering the rough brown paper with my careful lines and letters of blue ink. I spoke without thinking. “But his poem is wrong.”

  “Wrong how?” asked Nicola.

  Where had that come from? I examined the memory of my effort, comparing it to the poem d’Aurillac had shared. Every letter matched as perfectly as was possible, given that I had used a ballpoint pen and a paper bag instead of a goose quill and parchment. But the tools shouldn’t have mattered. This wasn’t libriomancy, where perfect physical resonance would enhance the magic. “I’m not sure.”

  Her song changed to a minor key. “How much does Meridiana know?”

  “That depends on what she plucked out of my brain before Ponce de Leon dropped me in his pocket.” I caught Lena’s expression and added, “I’ll explain later.”

  “We’ve had little success pulling the memory of that poem from your mind,” Nicola said. “Either it somehow defends itself against prying, or else d’Aurillac provided you with a form of mental armor to guard his secret.”

  “That’s a neat trick, coming from someone who died a thousand years ago.” I walked to the bookshelves to take a closer look at the titles. Most were hardcovers, ranging from brand-new releases to leather- and cloth-bound works that appeared at least a century old. “I take it Gutenberg is waiting outside?”

  Nicola didn’t answer.

  “Half these books are in English, but the rest . . .” I dragged my finger along the lacquered edge of the shelf. “German, Spanish, Middle English, Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, and more. Even among the Porters, most of us can’t read this many languages without magic.”

  “We have fourteen polyglots among the Porters,” Nicola said.

  “But how many of them would have a disproportionate interest in books from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries?” I tapped the spines one by one. Whatever Nicola was doing to sharpen my mind, I was starting to enjoy it. “My parents were always listening to seventies music, because it’s what they enjoyed as kids. These are the equivalent of Gutenberg’s oldies station.”

  Nicola stopped singing. “He thought you’d be more likely to trust me rather than him, given the circumstances.”

  “You mean the fact that the last time he saw me, he gave me a magical lobotomy?”

  “Yes.” She opened the door and stepped into the hallway. “Come with me.”

  Nicola led us past a small kitchen to a hardwood-floored room where Johannes Gutenberg and Juan Ponce de Leon sat arguing over deep-dish pizza and imported German beer. My incomplete poem sat on the glass table in front of them, along with a stack of old books, all safely out of range of their meal. Both fell silent as we entered.

  An old upright piano stood in the corner by two walls of floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out on the water. Gutenberg had sprung for a corner apartment. Nice.

  More bookshelves filled the third wall. A wood-topped bar separated the kitchen from the living room. They’d converted the bar and part of the kitchen into something reminiscent of the Batcave, with oversized computer monitors hooked up to a series of keyboards and laptops. I could hear the computer fans humming from across the room.

  “We need the rest of the poem,” Gutenberg said without preamble. Ponce de Leon rolled his eyes.

  “That’s nice,” I said. “I need my magic back.”

  “Told you so,” Ponce de Leon murmured.

  Gutenberg shot him an annoyed look. “Given your role in releasing Meridiana in the first place, Isaac, I would have thought you’d be eager to help.”

  “I’ve been trying to help. I’m the one who figured out who we’re fighting, remember? I’m the one who went to chat with the dead pope.”

  Gutenberg started to respond, and then Ponce de Leon touched him gently on the forearm. Gutenberg sighed and sat back. “That’s true enough,” he conceded.

  He looked and sounded . . . older, which I didn’t think was possible. Gutenberg wasn’t truly immortal, but he came as close as anyone. One of his first printed works had been an edition of the Latin Vulgate Bible, which he used to create a Holy Grail.

  The Bible didn’t explicitly reference the grail as providing eternal life, but by that point in time, belief in the grail legend had grown powerful. When Gutenberg reached into the pages and pulled out the chalice from the Last Supper, the faith and belief of those readers came with it. It was quite the trick, but Gutenberg had been bending the rules of libriomancy from day one.

  The grail’s magic was supposed to keep him young and healthy, but he had lost weight, and his eyes were shadowed. Thick, unkempt hair and a beard framed a narrow face with tired eyes that made me think of a cranky, burned-out schoolteacher.

  “This is your place?” I asked.

  “It’s where I stay when I’m in the Midwest.”

  I walked to the low table and picked up what appeared to be a bound manuscript of an unpublished novel. “John Porter. Isn’t that one of your aliases? You’re ghost-writing fantasy novels now?” The answer clicked into place as soon as the words left my mouth. “You’re putting weapons into production.”

  “We’ve had a number of stories prepared for quite some time,” Gutenberg said. “They’re updated as needed to keep the language and references fresh. We even have a trunk novel from H. G. Wells that we revised to meet our needs. The problem, as always, is one of timing. Publishing is anything but quick, and until we learn how Jeneta mastered e-books, self-publishing our texts electronically remains unfeasible.”

  I realized my mouth was hanging open. “Do you, um, happen to have a copy of that Wells novel here?”

  “Priorities,” Lena whispered.

  Right. The end of the world took precedence over an unpublished H. G. Wells. Barely. “Nicola said we were prisoners.”

  “For your own safety,” said Gutenberg.

  Ponce de Leon’s sigh conveyed volumes, as did Gutenberg’s answering glare. They seemed capable of carrying on entire conversations without words.

  “We need the sphere,” Gutenberg continued. “As we’ve been unable to draw the details from your mind, you will remain here to complete Gerbert d’Aurillac’s poem. Once you’ve done so, Juan and I will activate its magic and retrieve Meridiana’s prison.”

  “What then?” asked Lena. “What’s to stop Meridiana from breaking down your door and taking it away?”

  Gutenberg leaned forward and pulled out three thick books. “The armillary sphere acts as a miniature world. Many religions have powerful stories about the end of the world. It’s simply a matter of finding and unlocking the appropriate texts and applying them to Meridiana’s prison. We will end her world, and her along with it.” He gestured to the shelves. “I’ve brought reference books on Latin and medieval poetry, as well as works about d’Aurillac himself to help Isaac in his work.”

  “Restoring my magic would help more,” I said.

  Ponce de Leon’s lips twitched in what might have been a smile.

  “It’s not that simple, Isaac. Even if I trusted you with your magic, it’s far easier to remove someone’s abilities than it is to restore them. Not to mention that my lock gives you an additional layer of protection against Meridiana.”

  “So it is possible to undo your lock,” I pressed.

  “You know perfectly well that it is,” he snapped. I thought I saw him scowl in Nicola’s direction, but it happened too quickly to be certain. “Given our current situation, are you suggesting I neglect the various magical crises breaking out across the world and devote my energies to returning the magic of a single overly-reckless
libriomancer?”

  I said nothing.

  “I know you, Isaac. Hate me if you wish, but you won’t hold the fate of the world hostage for your own personal needs. You will work to complete Gerbert d’Aurillac’s poem.”

  Rarely had I been so pissed about someone else being right.

  RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL—Authorities are reporting the discovery of a secret subbasement in the Royal Portuguese Reading Room, believed to be one of the Porter archives described in the “Bi Wei Revelation,” a message that appeared as if by magic in a fantasy novel by American author George R. R. Martin.

  The governor of Rio de Janeiro praised the efforts of Colonel Raimundo Azevedo, who organized the raid. Shaped explosives were used to open a passageway to the hidden basement. While the contents of the archive are still being catalogued, one source claims that it held more than a thousand books, mostly Portuguese titles. There are conflicting reports that at least one prisoner was escorted from the building following the raid.

  The damage to the approximately 130-year-old library has created anger among the people of Brazil and throughout the world. Within minutes of the operation, images of shattered windows and smoke pouring from the Gothic-style building began circulating online.

  The Royal Portuguese Reading Room holds more than 350,000 books, and has been described as one of the most breathtaking libraries in the world. Only authorized military personnel are currently being allowed in and out of the building, making it impossible to estimate the damage.

  This is the first conclusive verification of the information provided in Bi Wei’s letter to the world. Authorities have been quick to stress that this archive does not prove the existence of magic or any secret society . . .

  GUTENBERG’S CHICAGO APARTMENT WAS roughly the same size as Ponce de Leon’s luxury hotel suite, but even if it had been twice as large, that wouldn’t have been enough space to contain the stress and tension—not to mention the egos—stuck inside.

  Nicola spent most of her time monitoring the computers and video chatting with various Regional Masters around the world. Her head and hands were usually moving in time to music playing through the wireless earbuds she wore at all times. As far as I could tell, she never switched them off; she simply lowered the volume a bit when she had to converse with others.