Unbound

by Jim C. Hines

  “Sorry.” I held up my hands. “It’s a line from Star Trek II. Spock points out that Khan’s pattern ‘indicates two-dimensional thinking.’”

  Nicola frowned. “I don’t understand.”

  “I’ve been thinking like a twenty-first-century librarian. Gerbert d’Aurillac was brilliant, but he was also a product of his age. He lived in a time when Arabic numerals were the hot new thing in Europe, and the zero hadn’t caught on.”

  I swallowed the last of the bagel and returned to my desk. D’Aurillac had been fluent in multiple languages, but he had written his poem in Latin, the language of the church. He would have wanted it to be understood by another educated man. Back then, that meant someone familiar with Latin, along with the trivium—grammar, logic, and rhetoric—and the more advanced quadrivium—arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. He would also have assumed that whoever found his poem would have a grounding in magical theory.

  I stared at the poem until my vision blurred. I tried to focus not on words, but shape. Geometry and mathematics. Circles and angles and spokes. Seven spokes. That was a deliberate choice. Every stroke of the pen had been drawn for a reason. Seven . . . seven days of creation in the Old Testament. Seven musical notes in a scale. Seven deadly sins.

  On a whim, I searched for “septem,” the Latin word for seven. In order to help me find potential words, I had jotted down a table showing the frequency with which each letter appeared in the poem. The P was the least-used letter in the word septem, so I scanned for Ps, looking for anywhere they connected to E and T.

  I didn’t notice Ponce de Leon approaching until he sat down across from me.

  “The last time, it was a lost book of the Bible,” he said quietly.

  Letters crawled across my vision like tiny insects. I blinked and sat back, mentally marking my place in the word puzzle. “Huh?”

  “The atomic bomb terrified him.” He turned to watch Gutenberg, who had emerged to check one of the computer screens. “The Cold War was before your time. You didn’t live through the fear. What could magic do against the power that had devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki? For years, we watched the sky and waited for the scream of the sirens that would herald the end of everything.

  “So Gutenberg prepared his lost book. He knew some would accept it at face value while others denounced it as a forgery, but they would all read the alleged prophecies of Christ. Their belief and imagination would fuel those prophecies. Including one in which ‘the sword of the archangel Michael, commander of God’s armies, shall lay waste to the wicked and their tools of destruction. The angelic blade shall rip the sky asunder and rain brimstone upon those who would wage war.’”

  Most swords fit easily through the pages of a book. “He wanted to create a superweapon.”

  “A preemptive superweapon. In order for his plan to work, Johannes had to strike first. He couldn’t watch over the entire Earth, nor could he sit back and wait for the first missiles to launch. We didn’t have satellite television or instant social media updates back then. By the time we learned of a nuclear launch, it would be too late to save the world.”

  “This is what you were talking about in Rome,” I said quietly. “The split between you and Gutenberg.”

  “What gives any of us the right to play God over humanity? To judge and punish?”

  I thought about the phrasing of Gutenberg’s Biblical prophecy. “What counts as ‘those who would wage war’?”

  “Exactly.” Ponce de Leon nodded slowly. “Had Johannes gone through with his plan, he would have eliminated the world’s nuclear stockpile, but slaughtered half the globe in the process. The power of such magic would have certainly killed him as well. We fought for so long over that book. Over his need for control and his lack of faith.”

  “You stopped him.”

  “I did.” He didn’t elaborate. He didn’t have to. The haunted emptiness in those two words conveyed how much his actions had cost him. “But this time is different. Even if I wished to do so again, Johannes will have taken steps to prevent me.”

  “Maybe he’s right,” I said.

  Both black eyebrows rose. “Not a sentiment I expected to hear from you, Isaac. If you’re considering the end of magic to be a good thing, perhaps Doctor Shah was right about your depression.”

  I scowled. “Look at how many people Meridiana has corrupted or killed using magic.”

  “That has nothing to do with magic and everything to do with the nature of man. Or woman, in this case. Eliminate magic, and perhaps you stop this threat. What of the next?” He reached past me to pick up a crumpled sketch I had done. “What’s this?”

  I had to stop myself from trying to snatch it away. My cheeks burned. “It started as a picture of the poem’s geometry . . . but then I got frustrated and turned it into a plan for a tiny steam-powered airship for Smudge. He’d provide the heat for a tiny, fireproof dirigible, and there would be eight little straps he could use to steer.” I had even drawn tiny goggles over his eyes.

  An odd smile played over Ponce de Leon’s mouth. Slowly and carefully, he smoothed out the picture, as if it was a lost Van Gogh rather than a silly pencil sketch. “This is where magic is born. No matter what happens, nobody can take that from you.” He returned the drawing to me and stood. “On that note, I should leave you to your work.”

  “I need copies of tenth- and eleventh-century star charts and constellations!” I had lost track of where everyone was, so I shouted loudly enough for the whole apartment to hear.

  Lena was the first to reach me, followed closely by Nicola and Gutenberg.

  “You have something?” Gutenberg asked.

  “Maybe.” I jabbed a finger at the poem. “The triangle is the outermost shape. That’s the number three, the trinity. At first I thought it was symbolic, a way of suggesting that God contains all things, only that’s not what d’Aurillac was getting at. It’s a matter of perspective. Two-dimensional thinking. God isn’t surrounding the poem. He’s above it.”

  They simply stared. Nidhi had come up behind Lena, and I heard Ponce de Leon limping toward me from the bedroom. None of them understood.

  “D’Aurillac created this poem to house his celestial sphere.” I grabbed another piece of paper and drew a quick set of intersecting ovals. “This is how we’d illustrate a sphere today to show it as a three-dimensional shape, but most artwork from his time didn’t use forced perspective the way we do. This poem is the sphere. This central circle is the Earth. The seven spokes connect us to the sun, the moon, and the five planets.”

  I pointed triumphantly. “Look where the top spoke connects to the outer ring. There’s the large A for Anna. To the left is the word fortuna, which means fortune. To the right, lucis, or daylight. Combine the last and first two letters of those two words, and you get Luna, the Latin name for Selene, the goddess of the moon.”

  “But the two pieces of the word are on the wrong side,” said Nidhi. “That would make ‘nalu,’ not Luna.”

  “Exactly!” I beamed as I drew a faint loop from the end of fortuna to the beginning of lucis. “It’s not enough to simply connect the two parts. The letters have to circle around the A. Just as the moon orbits round the Earth.”

  I slammed the pencil down. “The heavens are all here, just as Gerbert crafted them. All except the stars.” I pointed to the transcribed lines of text. “I’m betting the constellations will unlock his message. I need illustrations by Ptolemy and al-Sufi, and for that I need access to either a library or the Internet.”

  “It’s not safe for you to leave,” said Nicola. “Meridiana is searching for you. As are several teams of vampires, if our intelligence is correct.”

  “Great. Internet it is.”

  Gutenberg left without a word. He returned carrying an old brick of a laptop. “Nicola?”

  She ran a network cable from behind the bar to the laptop, then sat down and began typing. “I’m routing him through the same proxy servers and firewalls we’re using on the main syst
em.”

  Ten minutes later, I was downloading excerpts and images of The Book of Constellations of the Fixed Stars, by Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi. I had no idea whether Gerbert d’Aurillac had been familiar with his work, but al-Sufi was a tenth-century astronomer, so his illustrations should be similar to what d’Aurillac had used and observed. There was only one problem with the pages filling the screen. “Does anyone here read Persian? I can’t—wait, never mind.”

  I clicked on the thumbnail view option and skimmed through the pages, searching for illustrations.

  “Big, smart librarian, and all he wants to do is look at the pictures,” Lena murmured.

  I enlarged a page with a chart and picture of Ursa Minor. “Printer?”

  “Behind the bar,” said Nicola.

  I printed the first of al-Sufi’s constellations and clicked to the next. The scale wouldn’t necessarily match my grid of nonsense words, but the stars and lines would show me what patterns to search for. Depending on how obsessive d’Aurillac had been about accuracy—and given what I had seen so far, I wasn’t about to underestimate him—finding one constellation should give me a relative idea of the size and positions for the rest.

  Ursa Major, Draco, Cepheus, Boötes, Hercules. I sent them all to the printer, then hurried to the bar, unwilling to wait. I grabbed the finished pages and brought them back as the printer continued to spit forth illustrations.

  I started with the circumpolar constellations, those that would have been visible year-round from the northern hemisphere. Ursa Major was the most memorable. I traced circles onto clear plastic to use as a template, then attacked the text. Holding the template at varying heights allowed me to expand or shrink the scale.

  “How do you know which way is ‘up’?” asked Lena.

  “It would depends on the season. Logically, the pole star should be in the center of the map, which means Ursa Major would rotate around that fixed point.” I scooted my chair back and stood, slowly circling the table to examine the text from different angles. I bumped into someone and muttered an apology without looking up.

  “Shall we leave Isaac alone to finish transcribing the universe?” Amusement colored Ponce de Leon’s words.

  I barely noticed as they moved away. One step at a time, I was decoding a message Gerbert d’Aurillac had left more than a millennium ago. It had all the excitement of being a kid and making up secret codes with your friends, only this code had been created by one of the smartest men of his age.

  Six hours later, the thrill had pretty much disappeared, replaced by a throbbing headache and dry, aching eyes. The constellations hadn’t turned up a single usable word. Either I had wasted most of the day racing down the wrong path, or I was missing a vital piece of the puzzle.

  I knew the dangers of getting too attached to unproven theories. If I was wrong about the constellations, I needed to walk away and find a new angle. But this felt right. The shapes, the numbers, the sphere, everything fit.

  I pushed back from the table and stretched. A plate sat untouched beside the laptop. I picked up the sandwich and called out, “Thanks to whoever made dinner.”

  “That was Ponce de Leon,” said Nicola. “Two hours ago.”

  A conquistador and sorcerer had made me turkey, lettuce, tomato, and cheese on a poppy-seed bagel. Nice. I crunched down and went in search of something to drink. The bundled cords and cables Nicola had strung through the kitchen were as bad as tripwires. “How did you end up being Gutenberg’s personal network guru?”

  She didn’t look up from her screens. “I have experience with this kind of setup. It’s similar to what I used when I recorded my last album.”

  I stared at her through the gaps between the monitors. “You made an album?”

  “Three. I only made a hundred copies of each. They’re experiments, mostly. Exploring the limits of voice.” She turned to another screen, typed a command, and frowned. “Also, Gutenberg trusts me more than most of the other Regional Masters.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because I can’t stand politics. And because I told him he was wrong to kick you out of the Porters. Most of the others either don’t question his decisions or else they keep their disagreement to themselves. He prefers to know where people stand.”

  I grabbed a Coke and made my way out of the kitchen. “What’s that screen on the left?”

  “Our best assessment of Meridiana’s powers and limitations. Every attack tells us more about what she can do. All of her magic has been channeled through e-books, suggesting she’s limited by Jeneta’s own potential.”

  “That’s a lot of potential.”

  “True, and the fact that we don’t understand her power complicates things. In addition to Jeneta’s libriomancy, Meridiana maintains her connection to the Ghost Army. She’s able to use the dead to possess and control her transformed monsters. The transformation is book-based magic, but the ghosts are something else entirely.” Nicola pointed to another monitor. “By the way, someone scoped out your house last night.”

  I froze, my drink halfway to my mouth. “Lena’s tree?”

  “They didn’t hurt anything this time. They were using magic to shield themselves, but they tripped one of the infrared beams Whitney set up. As far as she can tell, nothing was touched or disturbed, but we can’t be certain. They may have just been checking to see if you were home, or they may have wanted a way to track you down.”

  Depending on the power of the hunter, a single leaf from Lena’s oak could be enough to find her. Or a hair from my brush. For the right kind of magic, a sweaty sock was as good as a compass. “How good are the protections on this place?”

  “The best we can make.” She sang a quick verse in Greek, and two of the monitors changed views. “You should be safe for now. Meridiana wasn’t able to steal d’Aurillac’s secrets from your mind. That means her best plan is to wait for you to unlock his magic. That’s when she’ll try to kill us all and take the poem and the sphere.”

  I snorted. “If she’s waiting for me to crack this thing, we could be stuck here for years.”

  “The constellations haven’t worked?” She continued to watch the monitors as she spoke, rarely making eye contact. She was too busy keeping an eye on the rest of the world.

  “No, they haven’t.” I stepped back, turning that image over in my thoughts. Nicola sat on her padded bar chair like a goddess on her throne, looking down at the mortals below. “But that’s because I’m an idiot.”

  She didn’t say anything. Which was a little insulting, actually. It would have been nice if she’d argued.

  “Tenth-century thinking.” I swallowed. “There are two perspectives for showing the stars. One is to draw the sky as we see it. That’s what I printed out from al-Sufi’s text.”

  I hurried back to the table, snatched up the transparency of Ursa Major, and held it toward the ceiling. “This is what we see when we look up at the stars. But there’s a second perspective.” I flipped the transparency and held it over the poem. “God sits above the stars, looking down! From God’s perspective, the stars and constellations would appear backward.”

  Five minutes later, I had it—the first word of Gerbert d’Aurillac’s message. “Octavian,” I shouted triumphantly. The seven stars in Ursa Major aligned perfectly. The O and the C were linked together, the C hooked through the circle of the O. I even recognized the reference. “The treasures of Octavian were a legend, a story of hidden caverns full of bones and gold. Historians assumed the stories were about old Etruscan tombs, but according to William of Malmesbury, d’Aurillac knew the secret of entering those hidden caverns. William’s account is more myth and superstition than fact, but—”

  “But we know d’Aurillac hid the armillary sphere somewhere it would be safe,” said Gutenberg. I hadn’t even heard him enter. Lena and Ponce de Leon were with him.

  “Somewhere inaccessible to mortal man,” said Ponce de Leon.

  “The elements of the story would seem to fit.” Gutenberg sta
red at the poem as if he could peer right into those shadow realms. “Valuables secreted away, protected from discovery, with dire warnings against disturbing them.”

  “If Ursa Major is here . . .” I circled the letters on the page and penciled in the lines to complete the constellation. “Someone pass me Virgo.”

  If Virgo was on the map, it would mean d’Aurillac had used the spring sky as his guide. That was why the poem felt wrong. He had prepared it beneath a different sky. If the magic was attuned to the stars, I would need to adjust it to align with the autumn constellations. That meant uncovering the rest of the hidden words, then reverse engineering the overall grid and the original poem.

  “What is it?” asked Lena.

  I realized I was grinning. “I was thinking about Jeneta. She used to laugh at me when I struggled with poetry. She would love this.” My smile faded. “I hope I get the chance to share it with her.”

  Stormy Knight Publishing would like to apologize to our readers and to author Stuart Pan for the errors in this week’s release of The Foretelling. While all of our titles are reviewed by multiple editors and proofreaders, it would appear that the file sent to the printer contained portions of another, as-yet-unidentified story, which was somehow inserted into the manuscript.

  We are posting the corrected versions of chapters six and seven of The Foretelling on our Web site for download, and we have pulped all remaining copies from our warehouse. Bookstores have been instructed to pull the title from their shelves and return it to us. If you have already purchased this book, you can return it for a full refund or a replacement, which should be available within two weeks. If you bought the book electronically, we will be working with e-book vendors to push a corrected file to your device.

  After reviewing the inserted text, we have determined that it did not come from any of the books in our catalog, nor does it appear to be from a known published work. We are investigating the possibility that this was deliberate hacking and sabotage.

  Here is a paragraph from the affected chapters. If anyone recognizes the excerpt in question, please contact us at editor@skpub.net.