Bookburners: Season One Volume One

by Max Gladstone

  The cold fire against her chest was real. Her skin seared, froze, cracked. She followed the pain back to her body and retreated, unsteady, as if her legs belonged to someone else. She staggered out into the hall. The arm stretched toward her, impossibly long.

  She slammed the door shut on the thing’s hand.

  The Perry-thing didn’t seem to care. It kicked the door open. Mangled fingers clicked back into place. Its smile split as it widened. It didn’t need a face anymore. Just teeth.

  From the bedroom she heard a window shatter.

  Bottleglass eyes widened. A black blur knocked the thing that was not her brother into the wall. Sal blinked, and the blur resolved into Grace. Slivers of window glinted from the insteps of her boots. She raised one of Perry’s monitors overhead and slammed it into the fallen creature’s face.

  Sally thought—Help. Her hand went to her shoulder holster, but Grace and the creature were too close, moving too fast. It threw Grace back, wriggled to its feet without concern for any principles of anatomy, and ran at her. Grace jumped back onto the bed, out of reach, dodged a tin claw, then jumped onto the creature before it could recover, toppled it to the ground, and struck it in the face four times with her forehead. A ceramic plate on the thing’s face broke—Grace clawed inside it for something Sal couldn’t see.

  “Take it easy! That’s my brother!”

  “It’s not,” Grace said. “It never was.” The creature threw her into the desk. Grace roared, dodged left; a claw shattered one of the remaining monitors. Grace grabbed the broken flat-panel from the floor and hit the arm, which snapped.

  “Grace, get back! Give me a shot.”

  “I have this. You worry about the guys downstairs.”

  “What?”

  “Go!”

  She went. Behind her more screaming, more broken glass. Downstairs, Todd sat in front of the book. His blue-gloved hands stroked its paper. He looked up and over at her.

  “Todd, Jesus Christ, there’s something up there.”

  But his goggle-swollen eyes were black from pupil out to edge. He turned a page of his book.

  The sword on the wall was missing.

  Footsteps in the hall beside her. Sal ducked back into the staircase. The sword rang off the wall—no edge on that blade, which made it marginally less dangerous, but a four-foot-long steel bar would break her bones just fine. The sword tore a deep gouge in wallpaper and drywall, and fell from Aiden’s hand. Before he could recover, Sal kicked the back of his knee, hit him a few times in the face, and he fell.

  Todd still sat, watching her, turning pages.

  Like Perry last night, staring at her as if from the bottom of a deep well.

  A heavy weight struck the front door, and the latch groaned. A man swore—Liam’s voice—and Aiden’s body began to move, more like a marionette than a person, a structure manipulated by contracting individual muscles.

  “Todd, close the book.”

  He blinked, slowly.

  She reached for the cover, thought better of touching the leather with her bare hands, and tried with the sword instead. When its tip touched, an electric shock seized her. The apartment squeezed around her like a fist, and again the cold fire flared against her breastbone. She opened her eyes—she’d fallen back onto the stairs, and Aiden was crawling toward her. She kicked him back, and pushed herself upright. Unclenched her hand from the sword.

  Crashing sounds from upstairs—a cry of pain, a frustrated roar.

  If there’s trouble, use the cross. . . . Like a mood ring, only in reverse.

  Dammit. None of this made sense. But—connections—the cross had burned her free of the Perry-thing’s influence. It hurt her, and she followed that pain back to her own mind. Maybe it could protect her from the book.

  She undid her top shirt button. The cross lay heavy against her skin, as if stuck by magnets. She pried it free; it left a red welt. Think about that later. Think about all this later. Just do. The closer she brought the cross to the book, the heavier it seemed. Her arm shook. What the hell were all those gym hours good for, if not for this?

  She hooked the book’s cover with the cross, and swung it closed.

  Sometimes in the winter, after twenty minutes’ walk down long avenues against a vicious wind, she’d take shelter in a subway stop and feel her body expand without anything to fight against. She felt like that now. Silence unfurled. The closed book vibrated like a plucked string. The cross had lost its sheen—all tarnished save where her fingers touched the silver.

  Aiden lay still, breathing heavy. Todd collapsed, trembling, to the sofa.

  She shook him by his shoulders. Pinched him. Struck him across the face. Tried the cross. The tarnished bit yielded no reaction. When she touched the part that was still shiny to his cheek, she heard a hiss. His eyes snapped open, and he screamed at a higher pitch than she’d thought his voice could make.

  “Todd. Dammit, Todd, are you okay?”

  “Sally,” he said. “Sorry.”

  “What the hell’s going on? Where’s Perry? What was that thing?”

  “Came this morning. Got into our heads. Left the dummy in his room, and the book—the pages talked to us. Told us what to do.”

  “It’s done. I closed the book.”

  “It got inside.” He touched his chest. “Still there. Whispers.”

  “Where’s Perry? The real Perry?”

  “Storage.” He coughed. “Took the other books, told us to stay here, distract people. He’s—”

  Black tendrils wormed across Todd’s eyes, through sclera and iris toward the pupil. Cords of muscle stood out on his throat.

  “Shit.” She tried the cross again, but he didn’t react. Covered in tarnish. She looked around, unsure. Maybe something here could help. But the house was a mess, except for the claw-foot table where the burner was no longer burning. She heard a hiss and smelled—

  The door burst open. She was already halfway down the hall, pulling Todd by the collar of his shirt. Dude weighed like a billion pounds, not to mention Aiden, who was at least out too cold to fight. Her back hurt like hell, and her legs were rubber, were jelly, were really fucking tired. Liam stood in the door, blinking like an idiot. “Gas,” she shouted, and saw him wince—earpiece, linked to her mic. “Help me!”

  He ran up the hall and grabbed Aiden. They left a wet trail through pulped newspapers and fallen leaves. Sal looked back and saw Grace slip out Perry’s bedroom window to the fire escape. She made it to the neighboring building before a hammer of air struck Sal in the chest and she fell.

  • • •

  Fire painted Liam’s face orange and green. Sirens wailed, too close for comfort. Grace dropped from fire escape to sidewalk. Sal stood; Aiden and Todd sprawled, unconscious but breathing, at her feet. “We have to get out of here,” Liam said.

  Understatement of the millennium, candidate number one. And yet.

  “What the hell was that?” She was shouting, and she didn’t care. “Any of that? No single piece of anything that just happened makes sense.”

  “Unless you want to be an accessory to arson,” Grace said, “can we talk about this later?”

  “Why am I an accessory to anything? I went in to help my brother and his friends. Now their house is on fire, they’re I don’t even know what—”

  “Unconscious,” Liam supplied.

  “Hypnotized, or something!”

  “That too.” The sirens were close now. An old man in a bathrobe stood a short distance up the street, staring. A crowd gathered in front of a coffee shop to watch the smoke. “Look, can we have this conversation anywhere else?”

  “I’m not leaving without an answer.”

  Liam stuffed his hands in his pockets. “I don’t—there’s no—it’s fucking complicated, okay?”

  “Then un-complicate it!”

  An iron cuff closed around Sal’s arm, only it wasn’t a cuff at all, but Grace’s hand. There was blood on the woman’s face, but no open wounds Sal could see—a few
cuts which, dammit, could not be scabbing over already. Could they? Grace’s eyes were stars around which the world wheeled.

  “Magic,” Grace said.

  “Magic?”

  “Magic.”

  “Grace,” Liam said, “she’s a civilian. I mean, are you really sure we should be talking about—”

  “You want to waste time keeping her out of the loop, waste your own.” Grace hadn’t turned from Sal. “We deal with magic. Okay?”

  “Okay,” she said. “Magic. Christ.”

  “We can tell you more. Not here.”

  4.

  “Start with that thing in my brother’s room,” Sal said when they stopped the van near Prospect Park. “What was it? Is Perry dead? What did it do with him?”

  “Homunculus,” Father Menchú said. He sat on an upended milk crate in the back of the van, working his keychain like a rosary. “He’s not dead, and the homunculus didn’t do anything with him—Perry was driving it from a distance.”

  “Homunculus?”

  “They’re not so bad once you get to know them,” Liam said. He was running a property records search, half-paying attention, as if this whole damn situation was normal, which made Sal even angrier. “Well, no, scratch that. They stay bad. Just an understandable kind of bad. You get used to it.”

  “You do this all the time.”

  “I wouldn’t go so far as to say all the time.” He swore at the monitor.

  Menchú offered coffee. “Grace didn’t drink hers.”

  Sal glared at him over the cup, and he withdrew it. “Tell me everything.”

  “Get out of here,” Grace said. “You’ve done enough.”

  “You tell me magic’s real, and then you want to kick me out?”

  “You were frozen on that sidewalk. Bad place to talk. You can leave now. I would.”

  “But you didn’t,” Sal said, “obviously.”

  Grace’s eyes were sharp as broken glass.

  Sal spoke fast to cover her discomfort. “Perry was not controlling that thing. Whatever spoke to me, it was not my brother. I want the truth.”

  “I didn’t lie to you,” Menchú said. “Not as such.”

  “You said my brother was in trouble because he stole a book. You didn’t mention magic or homunculuses or whatever.”

  “I said your brother was in possession of a stolen book.”

  She blinked. “Oh.”

  “This isn’t easy for anyone to hear the first time. The three of us are . . .” Menchú hesitated, searching for the right word.

  “Monster hunters?”

  “Archivists.”

  “Okay,” Sal said. “Now I’m confused.”

  “The three of us are part of a society responsible for stocking and tending the Vatican’s Black Archives.”

  Sal frowned. “I saw a Discovery Channel thing about that. Forbidden books. Heresies.”

  “That’s what people know,” Menchú said.

  Grace stood, squeezed past the priest into the van’s passenger seat, pulled a dog-eared copy of Pride and Prejudice from the glove compartment, kicked her feet up on the dash, and started reading.

  “The world’s bigger than most people know,” Menchú said. “Imagine we live on an island in an ocean full of monsters. Most of the time we’re safe from the monsters. But sometimes the tide rises. Sometimes the monsters cause big waves. Sometimes people dig channels that run out into the deep ocean, and hungry things come in. Sometimes they mean to; more often it’s an accident. These channels take the form of—artifacts. Books, often. Anything that connects one mind to another. For the last two thousand years, artifacts in Europe and the Americas have wound up in the Vatican’s Black Archives. The book your brother brought to your apartment is the Liber Manus, “the Book of the Hand,” which we assume is the name for the monster the book contains, a charismatic world-eater type with a taste for human minds. It surfaced for the first time in the nineteenth century, in London, shipped for America on the Titanic, and arrived in the care of a half-drowned baronet. The Liber Manus was unharmed by the crash, of course. If it could be damaged by such conventional means, we’d be out of a job. Before the book could do serious damage in the States, local officials killed its bearer and locked the volume away. The book’s been quiet for generations, and the warnings became department gossip. Precautions slipped. Traces of the Liber Manus’s existence reached the internet, and your brother found them.”

  “So Perry’s, what, he’s been taken over by a sea monster?”

  Grace, in the passenger seat, turned a page loudly. “He opened the book,” she called back. “The Hand jumped into his mind.”

  Liam clicked his mouse, swore, clicked again.

  “Demons,” Sal said. “You’re talking about demons.”

  “It’s not clear what they are, theologically speaking,” Menchú said. “Some present themselves as fallen angels, but they may be lying. Some don’t speak with us. Some can’t.”

  “Demons,” Grace said, and turned a page.

  “How did Perry even get this book?”

  “There are communities—” Menchú said.

  “Idiots,” Liam added.

  “—communities, loose associations of amateur scholars and technical experts who believe information wants to be free. Your brother and his friends belong to one. He and his friends, and their friends, know enough of the picture I’ve just outlined to believe the metaphor is literal. They’re mostly harmless, but your brother found a book with real power. He stole the merchandise from the initial thieves, who then turned on one another.”

  Fingers in an ashtray. Sal shuddered.

  “He brought the book home. His friends kicked him out because they were afraid of reprisals from the surviving criminals. ”

  “And us, ” Grace said.

  “So he went to your apartment. When we followed him there, the book offered him escape. He opened it. Ordinarily the, ah, demon’s control over your brother would have been limited in its first hours. We underestimated the depth of his study. He had the necessary languages, the right frame of mind, and no tools to resist possession. The Hand jumped into him. He must have left the homunculus at his apartment to keep watch, and to retrieve needed materials and information. He controlled it through the book in the townhouse.”

  “Was that the, whatsit, the Liber Manus? Did I close it?”

  “Hardly,” Liam said. “The book you closed back there was just a chump text.”

  “What?”

  “A poor copy,” Menchú explained. “The Hand recorded a piece of its name there, and projected its power through the name. That book will have burned up in the fire—unlike a true work, an imperfect copy has no special properties beyond its content. Find Perry, and we find the Liber Manus.”

  “Which is turning out to be terrifically easy, just for the record,” Liam said. “Perry’s cell phone’s dead. No property records on file. Traffic cameras follow him from the house at nine this morning, but lose him in a tunnel.”

  “And now the demon is free, riding your brother’s mind, somewhere in New York. It will cement its control, and once that’s done, it will gather acolytes.”

  “Cement,” Sal said. “So you can still save him.”

  “If we’re lucky, we can close the book without hurting him. Cut off the demon’s control.”

  “And if you’re not lucky?”

  Menchú’s lips pressed together. He returned the van keys to his pocket. They rang like bells. “When we close the book, he might be too far gone to come back. Your brother’s friends, in the house—they were, let’s say, wading in the surf. Perry’s swimming in a riptide.”

  “No.”

  “You don’t know what these things do when they get out of hand.”

  “How bad can it be? I’ve never seen a demon attack on the news.”

  “People disappear all the time. All over the world.”

  “Murders. Accidents. Shit happens.”

  “And sometimes the world swallows p
eople, and those left behind forget. A corner of an island falls into the sea. How can you tell it was ever there? Not even bones remain. If you know how to look, you can see the cracks where land once was. Lost legions. Lost cities. Have you ever heard of the town of Colebridge, New York?”

  “No.”

  “Exactly.”

  “That’s impossible. A whole town can’t just disappear.”

  “Information decays. Paper lasts, but people are good at disbelieving evidence. Those who don’t know how to feel around the edges of a gap might never notice gaps at all. The mind closes to cover even the largest wound. When was the last time you thought about the place where you were born?”

  “You’re saying it might eat New York.”

  “The more time we spend here, the longer the demon in your brother has to shore up his control. If you know how to find him, you could save lives. Including his.”

  “If I know anything, and I tell you, you’ll go in there, guns out, and hurt him.”

  “We want to close that book. We want to save these people.”

  “Go to the cops, if he’s so dangerous.”

  “What would you tell them? How could you explain the situation so they would intervene knowing what they faced?”

  “The Chief—”

  “Knows us. She calls us when your people are out of their depth.”

  “We could show them evidence.”

  “By the time the fire department’s done, the homunculus will be a pile of melted garbage. Magic leaves no traces for forensics.”

  “You guys can’t be it. It’s just the three of you in a rented van?”

  “Hey,” Liam said. “I like this van.”

  “This is a job for the government. The Men in Black. Some, like, I don’t know, some Library of Congress thing. The CIA.”

  “The problem,” Menchú said, “is older than your government. Its solutions are older, too.”

  Liam leaned back in his chair and looked at her upside down. “Besides, if you think we’re low-budget, imagine the team a library would field.”

  “This is what we do. These are the calls we make.”

  “Not today,” Sal said. “Not if I go after him myself.”

  Before Menchú could respond, she burst from the van into the cold gray morning and ran through the hedge into the park.