Bookburners: Season One Volume One

by Max Gladstone

  “Peru,” he said, not looking up. “Two years ago,” he added as if anticipating her question. “Liam showed us the amazing wonders of Photoshop to erase some of the years’ wear and tear.”

  Sal quirked an eyebrow. Menchú was giving an awful lot of information that she hadn’t asked for. She wondered if he were protesting too much. Oh well. One mystery at a time.

  The team leader looked up from reading his hefty tome and smiled. “What can I do for you?”

  “I heard about Asanti’s mentor,” she said, figuring it was best to stick with the truth as she tried to pull information from him.

  “Ah, Father Hunter.” He closed the book, marking his page with a red velvet ribbon. “Yes, she’s quite broken up about it. They were very close.”

  “Closer than the two of you?” Sal asked. “I mean, you two seem united against the world.”

  Menchú chuckled, a slight tone of bitterness touching his tone. “Oh yes. He recruited her. Unlike everyone else currently on the team, Asanti was not conscripted after a violent or frightening incident, manufacturing intense loss. She was eager to learn about the wonders of magic, and he took her under his wing.”

  He rubbed his face and thought for a moment. “Father Hunter retired some time back and I took over the team. I don’t think Asanti has ever forgiven me for not being him.”

  Sal frowned. “That doesn’t make sense. He retired—someone had to take his place. That’s not your fault.”

  “Most emotions aren’t logical,” he said. “We get along fine now, but she took some time to acclimate to my position.”

  Sal chose her words carefully, looking at the picture of Asanti and Menchú on his dresser. “She’s been on the team longer than any of you.”

  Menchú paused. “You could say that,” he finally said.

  “So it’s safe to say that she loves this organization,” Sal continued.

  Menchú chuckled again. “I’d go so far as to say she probably loves it too much,” he said.

  Sal put down the frame and faced Menchú. “What do you mean?”

  “Surely you’ve noticed. Her view of magic isn’t the same as ours. Our jobs here are to find, neutralize, and contain magic. But once we contain and shelve them and we are officially done with the job, Asanti’s curiosity can get the better of her and she continues research. It’s within the safety of the Archives, which is heavily protected, but she still approaches our horrors with interest and wonder. She insists knowledge is vital to understanding, but she doesn’t have enough caution.”

  “So she’s not as scared as the rest of you,” Sal said.

  “As you say.”

  “But you trust her?” she asked, finally.

  “Of course I do,” he said, frowning and tilting his head at her. “We risk our lives for this job. When we don’t trust each other, that’s how people die.”

  Sal nodded. “When will she be back from the funeral?”

  “I gave her three days, tops. I’m keeping an eye on the Orb in the meantime in case the world decides to catch fire,” he said, glancing at his huge tome. “In fact, if you’ll excuse me, I need to finish my reading here and then get to her desk.”

  “Thanks for your time,” Sal said. “Do you know if Grace is around? I wanted to ask her something while I was down here.”

  Menchú didn’t look at her, instead focusing on his book again. “I don’t recommend it. She’s resting, and doesn’t like being interrupted during her private time.”

  Sal checked her watch. “It’s almost noon,” she said.

  “Grace is a bit of an introvert. She doesn’t spend a lot of her downtime with the team. Ask her whatever you like when next you see her, but don’t seek her out when she doesn’t want to be found.”

  The voice was still friendly, but Sal could hear the commanding undertone.

  “Don’t mess with Grace. Got it,” she said to herself as she shut the door behind her.

  That left Liam, meeting her in half an hour.

  • • •

  Drinking two espressos was a bad idea. Sal didn’t know why she felt the need to drink coffee when she was nervous, but that’s what happened.

  When we don’t trust each other, that’s how people die.

  The underlying message was clear: Don’t hide things like Aaron from the team again, Sal. She didn’t regret hiding it, but she did regret the effect it had had on Menchú’s trust of her.

  The impending talk with Liam wasn’t helping her nerves, and she was about to order a third espresso when he showed up two minutes early.

  Her hands trembled slightly as he sat down. He held himself stiffly, sitting upright in his chair.

  “How are you, Sal?” he asked, sounding painfully formal. The guy needed something to put his mind at ease.

  “I’m good. Are you all right? You look a little . . . rigid. Bruised rib?”

  Liam relaxed a fraction. “I worked out with Grace last night. It was more rigorous than our sparring bouts tend to be. My ribs will remember it.”

  Sal felt odd thinking of Grace and Liam together, sparring, sweating. She rooted around in her backpack and pulled out some painkillers, putting them on the table between them. Liam took the bottle without comment and shook out two tablets, then handed it back to her.

  “Thank you.”

  Casually pushing aside the giant elephant in the room, Sal said, “Did you hear Asanti’s mentor died?”

  Liam’s eyebrows shot up, shock evident on his face. “Ah, no, I hadn’t heard that. They were quite close. Is she terribly broken up about it?”

  “Yeah, actually,” Sal said. “It worried me. I couldn’t ask her about it—it felt too personal—so I wanted to ask you if you knew anything about him.”

  Liam smiled, a lopsided grin. “You couldn’t ask her, but you didn’t mind nosing around behind her back?”

  Sal shrugged, not feeling guilty. “I’m a detective. Sniffing out information is something I can’t very well stop doing. I don’t think I should be ashamed for wanting to spare her feelings— but I still want to understand my new team.”

  “Asanti and her mentor were thick as thieves, as people say,” Liam said, finally relaxing a little. He met her eyes in little flicks, not avoiding her, but not holding her gaze for too long. “They were a pair who actually enjoyed the work here, not in a righteous evil-fighting way—”

  “Which is the way you enjoy it,” Sal interrupted.

  “Too true,” he said. “Most of us, I would say. But they saw each mission as a sort of exciting treasure hunt. Asanti has never respected what we do as having the danger that it does. She’s her own worst enemy, I’m sure. One of these days she will be more interested in studying a book than containing it, and that could be the end.”

  “Of what?”

  “Her. Us. Everything. Take your pick.”

  The waiter came to their table; Sal ordered a decaf coffee and Liam ordered an espresso. She mulled this new information over. “You sound like you don’t trust her.”

  Liam frowned and sat back, crossing his arms. A moment passed before he said, “I worry about her passion for the dangers we unearth. She sometimes seems like a curious child poking a stick at a snake. But—no, I do trust her. She’s served the team longer than any of us. If she was going to screw up, she would have done it by now. We just see things differently.” He looked around the bar, uncomfortable and tense again. “I think fear is good. It keeps you sharp, keeps you on the lookout for the nasty things that can kill you. I just wish she were more afraid.”

  Sal nodded slowly. Their drinks arrived and they sipped them in silence.

  Sal put some money on the table, frowned at it, counted in her head, and then put a little more down. Liam smiled at her. “You’ll get the hang of it.”

  “I hope so. I think I tipped the waiter one hundred percent the other night. And you guys don’t even tip here, let alone that much. I think he thought I was inviting him home with me.” Liam colored, and Sal fought to keep herse
lf from rolling her eyes. This boy was too sensitive. She cleared her throat. “Anyway, I hope nothing happens while Asanti’s gone. It’s pretty clear we need her, whether incautious or not.”

  Liam sat up straighter and looked at her expectantly.

  “I’ll see you around. I have some things I have to look into,” she said, and got up, smiling weakly.

  “Right,” he said, looking at his half-empty cup. “Thanks for the coffee. See you around.”

  • • •

  That hadn’t been awkward at all. Sal gritted her teeth as she walked back to her apartment. The discomfort with Liam had to be put aside for now. Something had lodged in her brain, something from her web search, and she had to figure out what it was.

  Back in her apartment, she turned on her computer and opened a browser. She put “Glasgow” into Google and swore when the results came up.

  The top hit was a restaurant review. Who would search for Glasgow restaurants over searching for the city itself? The second top hit, a review. Third, a restaurant review—same restaurant every time. The Wikipedia entry for the city didn’t even show up until page two. The official Glasgow website came up on the third page.

  Now it was officially weird.

  Sal chewed on her lip a moment, then checked flights to Glasgow. She sent a quick text to Liam, then she called for a car to take her to the airport.

  2.

  Sal didn’t like traveling without her gun.

  She would never admit it, but dealing with the fact that monsters and magic were real was a little bit easier than dealing with the fact that few people in Europe carried firearms. Not even the police in some countries. And since she wasn’t officially police anyway, she couldn’t get away with it. She certainly couldn’t travel internationally with a gun.

  Her toothbrush, though, they couldn’t take that from her. And she could fashion that into a shiv if she absolutely needed to. If the demons would give her just a few minutes to shave it down. And time to find something to shave it with.

  As her taxi pulled up to the terminal, she thought back to her days in college working at West Park’s EXTREME Cuisine at the foot of the Slippery Bunny ski slope in Vermont. It served fancy fusion cuisine for a clientele of hungry skiers who would rather spend fifteen dollars on a burger than twenty dollars on salmon fillet with dill sauce. She worked only during ski season, but Sal had learned more about crowd control from her few months as hostess there than in her time at the police academy. Restaurants were weird. And it was very weird to see one dominating searches for Glasgow.

  Distracted by her thoughts, Sal didn’t notice Asanti waving at her until she was nearly past the woman, who waited in the ticket line.

  “You took much longer than I expected,” Asanti said, frowning.

  “Well, the traffic was . . . wait,” Sal asked, blinking at her. “You’re not surprised to see me?”

  “You have an intense desire to learn the truth, do you not?”

  Sal felt like she had been caught doing something naughty. “Well, yes.”

  “I knew you would follow to find out more. You’re not the only one who is skilled at reading people,” Asanti said. She handed Sal a boarding pass. “Here’s your ticket. Let’s go.”

  • • •

  Asanti’s mood was on much more solid ground now, and she seemed her old, stoic self. “I’m glad you’re nosy and can’t leave anything alone,” she said as they walked toward their flight.

  Sal grinned at the backhanded compliment. “You deliberately manipulated me into coming. That’s impressive.”

  “Yes,” Asanti said. “My face isn’t always in those books.”

  “I’ll have to be more careful around you,” Sal said, only half joking.

  The tickets were for first class, and Sal soon found herself in an unfamiliarly cushy chair with a vodka tonic pressed into her hand.

  “I need backup,” Asanti said after they took off, speaking softly. “I couldn’t ask the others. No one else would understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  Asanti spread her hands over her tray table, as if the answers were written on her wrinkled dark skin. “Father Hunter didn’t retire, as most people consider retirement. He and the Order agreed mutually on his departure. He’d had enough of the politics and the rules, and they’d had enough of his—as they said—‘cavalier attitude’ toward his work. As if it were a sin to enjoy your calling.”

  This fit with what Sal had been told, but the retirement issue was new. “So he quit and moved back home?”

  Asanti nodded. “His sister had died a few months before, and her young daughter had no other family. So it worked out. He went back to Scotland to raise her. He adores his niece.”

  “You’re not going there just for the funeral,” Sal guessed.

  Asanti looked out the window at the rapidly retreating city. “Magic—everything we do in the Order—was amazing to him. He saw it as God’s greatest gift to us, and it was our duty to Him to learn as much as we could about it. Father Hunter even saw it as our next evolution. If we or our children or our grandchildren could learn as much as we could about this wonder, we would be evolving, be closer to God.”

  “That’s a . . . different perspective than any I’ve heard since I joined this happy family,” Sal said.

  Asanti smiled sadly. “He was the only one who saw it that way. He taught me to see it through his eyes, and I did for some time. But I have seen a lot of horrible things as well, and never became as idealistic as he is. Was.”

  Sal thought back to the few horrors she had seen thus far, and of Perry sleeping away in the bowels of the Vatican.

  “Father Hunter never saw it as evil? Never? From what I’ve seen, magic hurts a lot of people.”

  Asanti turned back to her, looking more energetic. “He saw power as a tool. A hammer or a scalpel is useful in the hands of a carpenter or surgeon. But if you give a toddler either of those, it will almost always end in disaster. We are the toddlers and magic is the tool, but Father Hunter wanted us to eventually become the carpenters and surgeons.”

  Sal dropped her tray table to accept another vodka from the flight attendant. “I want to believe you, and it sounds great, but I just keep thinking about Perry. That shit was not good magic.”

  “I said Father Hunter’s view was idealistic. What he could never figure out was how to make us grow from toddlers to adults without ending the world. We don’t have someone experienced to show us how to use these tools. That’s what we need.”

  “Then maybe we’re focusing on the wrong thing,” Sal said.

  Asanti regarded her. “That’s a good point. The only problem is, we’re usually too busy cleaning up messes to actually learn much. We only hear about them after they cause damage.”

  Sal took the opening. “That’s the other reason we’re going to Glasgow, isn’t it? I saw the coordinates you got from the Orb, Asanti. What else is going on?”

  Asanti put her hand on Sal’s. “What I’m about to tell you could cause a great deal of harm. It could get me fired, it could get Father Hunter posthumously excommunicated. It’s the reason I chose to deal with this without the whole team. Can I trust you not to tell the others?”

  Sal nodded. “All right. I can’t promise anything. If things are truly terrible the team needs to know. But if I can, I will keep it between us.”

  “When Seamus left the Order, he took a . . . keepsake. A book.”

  Sal shook her head as if she didn’t hear correctly. “He took what?”

  “His position was a sort of combination of my own and Menchú’s, both team leader and archivist. He would contain the books and shelve them. Sometimes he would read them. One day we had a mission to recover a book that he swore was good. It was an easy mission, one of the easiest I can remember. No one got hurt, no one fought. The book did no harm, but we took it in anyway. He knew the book hadn’t hurt anyone, and so Father Hunter wanted to study it. He assured me it held benevolent magic. When he left, he did
n’t want his studies to end because he was no longer part of the Order, so he took the most passive book he knew of. He kept me apprised of his use of the book, and what he learned, and I kept his secret and covered up the missing book by doctoring the files.”

  “How do you know he was telling the truth?” Sal’s voice was hard and rushed as she tried to avoid raising it on the plane. “He could have been possessed and lying.”

  Asanti looked at her coldly. “He was my mentor, Sally. I know.”

  Sal rubbed her face and sat back and sighed. “All right, someone who may or may not have been a toddler was running around with a scalpel. Then the toddler died. What happened then?”

  Asanti took a sip of her tomato juice. “That’s where the details get fuzzy. He was supposed to will the book to me; the plan was for me to come to his funeral and bring it back to the Order.”

  “But the Orb fired after he died. Someone’s using his book instead of packing it away for you,” Sal guessed.

  Asanti nodded. “Something must have gone wrong. So I have to retrieve it.”

  “What did it do?”

  “He never would tell me. We talked about things on a larger scale, how he had managed to contain the magic within to focus it on a good cause. He was so excited about it, and it was such a nice change to talk to someone who wasn’t absolutely convinced that magic is one hundred percent evil.”

  “God, Asanti. I can’t believe you put yourself in this position,” Sal said, looking up at the flight attendant button and contemplating another drink.

  “As I said, the other options are excommunication and termination—of employment, if I’m lucky,” Asanti said, and winced. “Can I count on you?”

  Sal closed her eyes. “If you’re not the one holding the book right now, we have to look to the next person closest to him. I guess we’re going to start with this niece of his.”

  “He lived with her above her business in Glasgow. I have the address.”

  “Then we head there,” Sal said.

  • • •

  “Reason for visiting Scotland?” the customs official asked. She was a pale, bored-looking woman of about sixty.