Bookburners: Season One Volume One

by Max Gladstone

  “It’s been quite an eventful few days for you.” Her eyes flicked to Sal. “I hope you’re able to get your house back in order after this unfortunate . . . disruption.”

  “Repairs to the Archives are already underway,” said Menchú.

  The Maitresse smiled. “That too.”

  And without waiting for a reply, she turned and walked away, back up the road to the castle. Sal and Menchú stood together in silence, watching her go, until her steps carried her around a bend and out of sight.

  Menchú broke their tableau first, heaving his case into the trunk of the car. “Come on, let’s go home.” Sal followed suit and slid into the front passenger seat beside him. For the hundredth time, she slid her hand into her pocket, fingers seeking the reassurance of the folded piece of paper she had put there, the only physical evidence that remained of her encounter with the techno-cultists.

  It was the paper where she had written her question for the Index: What is Mr. Norse looking for?

  It now bore only two words: Codex Umbra.

  • • •

  Hours later, when Sal and Menchú reached Rome, the Archives still looked like a bomb had hit them. A non-fiery, book-oriented bomb, sure, but a bomb nonetheless.

  Asanti took a break from picking up the pieces of her library to hug them both. Sal felt a surge of relief as her arms went around the archivist. Sometimes you just had to touch someone to prove to yourself that they were still alive.

  “Liam is glued to his computer,” Asanti told Sal when she asked about the others. “Grace went home to sleep.”

  It had been a long three days for everyone, Sal supposed. Between being up all night for the Market, plus staying up for most of the days between, Sal felt like she hadn’t slept in a week. She’d dozed for a few hours on the train, but her sleep had been filled with dreams of wandering the corridors between compartments, looking for something. She certainly didn’t feel rested. Then again, she never had slept well away from her own bed.

  Bed.

  Liam.

  Sal excused herself and went in search of their beleaguered tech expert. Time to prove to herself that he was still alive too.

  • • •

  She found him, as promised, hunched over his laptop, and lingered in the doorway, waiting for him to notice her. When he didn’t, she cleared her throat. Liam looked up.

  “You saved the day,” said Sal. “Nice work.”

  Liam shrugged off the compliment. “Not quick enough. Who knows what those techno-bastards found while they were flipping through the Archives? Or what they left behind.”

  “Did you find any reference to the Codex Umbra?”

  “Not even a description of what it might be. Which is what worries me.”

  Sal sighed. “Take the win, then. We’ve got a hell of a mess to clean up, but at least we’re all okay, right?” She slid up behind him, letting her thumbs dig into the tense muscles of his shoulders. “Thanks to you.”

  He shrugged her off. “Unless Mr. Norse managed to find and erase the information he was looking for. With all of the books the hack disturbed, it could take us centuries to find out what damage he did.”

  Liam turned back to his computer. Sal blocked him by plopping down in his lap. “If it will take centuries anyway, it can wait until morning.”

  “Sal, I’m too tired—” he began.

  “And so am I. But I’ve spent the last three days afraid you were going to die, and I don’t want to be alone tonight. Besides, you look like hell. You’re going to have to sleep sometime; it might as well be with me.”

  Liam gently put his hands on her waist and lifted her to her feet. “Okay,” he said. “But go ahead. I’ll let myself in later.”

  Sal wanted to protest, but she was too tired. “Fine. Whatever you want.”

  That night, Sal dreamed of wandering the streets of Rome, looking for that same thing she could not name. When she finally woke, hours past dawn, the other side of the bed was undisturbed.

  Coda.

  Menchú stayed in the Archives late into the night. The niche he had previously designated as his office had been completely destroyed by Mr. Norse’s hacking. His poor, long-suffering chair had lost a leg at some point, snapped off just below the seat. Menchú located the missing piece and was contemplating repairs when he felt Asanti staring at him.

  “Did you tell her?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “Now she knows. But I don’t know that it’s made her a more cautious swimmer.”

  Asanti made a noncommittal “hmm” noise.

  Menchú quirked an eyebrow at her. “What?”

  “Did you ever consider that you learned the wrong lesson from your experience with the angel in Guatemala?”

  “It tortured and murdered an entire village. It wasn’t an angel.”

  Asanti shrugged. “You’ve read the Bible. God kills people all the time. Violence, disease, apocalyptic flood. Even Jesus had a temper.”

  Menchú felt his own temper rising and made an effort to keep it in check. Asanti continued.

  “You’d dealt with demons before. If you’d realized what the boy was immediately and banished him, or refused to make a deal, would the massacre still have happened?”

  “If you’re trying to say that what I did didn’t make a difference, I assure you—”

  “I’m saying that you knew demons were evil before that night. If that was the lesson you were supposed to learn, someone was being very redundant with your education.”

  Menchú let out a long breath. He was too tired to have this discussion now. Possibly ever. “What’s your point, Asanti?”

  “Demon, angel, or something else, from what you’ve told me, making a deal with that thing was the only possible way you could have prevented a massacre that night.”

  Menchú gritted his teeth. “But I did, and it didn’t.”

  “But what if that was the lesson?” Asanti gripped his sleeve, begging him with her eyes to listen and understand. “Next time, make a better deal.”

  Menchú turned away. Asanti let go of his arm, and he heard her footsteps fading away, quickly muffled by the destruction around them. Her words lingered long after she had disappeared among the stacks.

  Next time.

  Episode 6: Big Sky

  by Brian Francis Slattery

  “All right,” Cardinal Varano says. “Tell me what happened.”

  Sal is seated in the wood-lined hearing room of the Societas Librorum Occultorum. Menchú had shown her this room once, when she first arrived. She’d thought it looked like a courtroom then. It looks even more like a courtroom now. There is the cardinal, seated at the head of the room behind what looks for all the world like a judge’s bench. There is an expanse of floor between him and the rest of the people in the room, the kind of space that lawyers should be stalking, though there are no lawyers here, and for the first time in Sal’s life, that makes it worse.

  Someone needs to witness this, she thinks.

  The rest of them are seated behind a long wooden table. The monsignors of all three teams of the Society: Fox for Team One, Usher for Team Two, Angiuli for Team Three. There is Archivist Asanti, and a few of each of the team’s members. They’re at a hearing. Inquest is the official word. To determine cause of death. But Sal feels more like they’re at a tribunal. Maybe they’re at a kangaroo court.

  “Let’s begin with you, Team Three,” Cardinal Varano says.

  Monsignor Angiuli turns to Sal with helpless eyes. Sal’s never spoken to him before today. She’s learned some things about him from Menchú, but so far their conversation right before the hearing is the only contact she’s had with him. He’s a kindly old man not prone to oversight, and he’s given Menchú a very long leash in the past few years. He’s barely read any of the reports Menchú has filed with him.

  Sal looks at the cardinal.

  “I’ve never done one of these before,” she says. “Should I stand?”

  Varano
frowns. “If you want to.” Sal may or may not have detected a vague note of disappointment, like a mean grandfather would have. She’s messed up, she thinks, either because she wasn’t standing already or because she admitted she didn’t know the rules, or maybe both-- and three other things she doesn’t even know about yet.

  She puts it out of her mind and stays in her chair. Before she speaks, she looks up at the stained-glass ceiling high above them. She wants more light, but it’s a cloudy day, and the light won’t come.

  Cardinal Varano talks slowly, making it plain that he’s condescending to speak to her in English.

  “You are aware,” he says, “that these types of proceedings are highly unusual. They are generally unnecessary. But given the many ways that this particular case almost escaped us, and the way it led to such destruction, injury, and loss of life among our own personnel, it is very important that we understand what went wrong, and what it means for Society operations in the future.”

  Without Sal’s permission, a few bad memories flit across her brain. Grace knocked through the air, through the wall of a building. The look on Menchú’s face just before the dust cloud overtook him. Someone impaled on a long tooth. Someone else diving into the ground, and the earth closing around him.

  A mother and son, crying.

  “I understand,” Sal says.

  The cardinal gives a very hoarse laugh, devoid of any mirth whatsoever.

  • • •

  The sky was enormous. Team Three had just gotten off the interstate and the van was now speeding down a county road, just a straight shot across the flattest land Sal had ever seen. The tallest things for miles were the telephone poles, in a jagged line running next to the road. In the van, Sal craned her neck to look out the window. She thought she would feel some sense of freedom, of exhilaration. The open road, the open sky, like in a bad country song. But she didn’t feel any of that. She just felt exposed. Vulnerable.

  “Jesus,” Liam said. “There is nothing out here.”

  “You said that already,” Grace said. “Four times.”

  “There’s still nothing here,” Liam said.

  The Orb, Asanti had told them, had gone off in a flash, like something had exploded inside it, before it clacked out the coordinates. It was unusual. Unusually intense. What does that mean? Menchú had asked. Asanti shrugged. I don’t know, she had responded, tell me when you find out.

  Then it had been a nineteen-hour trip from Rome, with layovers in London and Dallas. By the time they were on the final leg to Tulsa, even Liam had run out of things to talk about. They got into the van without saying more than three words to each other. And now here they were. The road was loud under the van’s tires. The wind battered the windshield.

  “There really is—” Liam said.

  “Don’t,” Grace said. “Just don’t.”

  • • •

  They pulled into the town of Tanner City twenty minutes later. Or what was left of it. Twenty-two hours before, Liam told them, at about one in the morning, a tornado had touched down in a farmer’s field a mile away. It grew to be almost half a mile wide and cut a ragged slash through the town. There was little warning, and thirty-three people died. The next morning, some parts of town were filled with debris from other parts of town. One house had been speared by a tree that the twister had uprooted, stripped of its branches, and then thrown back down to earth. Other blocks weren’t touched at all. And then there were the blocks that looked as if they’d never been built; there was nothing but the streets, sidewalks, driveways, and the concrete slabs that the houses had once stood on. That was all.

  The county road turned into Main Street, and they drove into the middle of town, where Main Street crossed a bigger road. The intersection was clean and tidy; it had been spared. On one corner there was a musical instrument shop; on another, a gas station. They could see a little hardware store, a pharmacy, a restaurant with the specials on a sign taped to the window.

  “Is it weird that there’s no one here?” Liam asked.

  “I was thinking the same thing,” said Grace.

  “Sal, you’re the American here,” Liam said. “Is this weird?”

  “I . . . don’t know,” Sal said. “I’m an East Coast girl.”

  Grace parked the van and they got out. The stoplight at the intersection changed from green to yellow to red and back again. Still not a single other car.

  “Where is everyone?” Menchú asked.

  Grace let out a little, impatient sigh. She went to the door of the nearest shop, a liquor store, and tried it. It was locked, and the place was dark inside. She rapped on the glass.

  “Anyone home?” she said.

  She waited three seconds, then moved to the pharmacy next to the liquor store and did the same thing. Then the jewelry store next to that and the clothing store next to that. Each time, she rapped a little louder, raised her voice a little more. She was moving to the next one when a door opened across the street.

  “Hey!” a voice said.

  Sal turned. It was coming from the instrument shop. There was a man with a neat beard standing in the entrance. He’d opened the door just a little.

  “Quiet down!” he said. “Quiet down now or they’ll find you.”

  “Who?” Grace said, without quieting down.

  “The Tornado Eaters,” the man said.

  “The what?” Liam said.

  “The—” the man began. But he was interrupted. From somewhere, maybe a block over, maybe from the sky, there came a long, high, echoing wail that pitched up at the end.

  “Get inside!” the man said.

  “I think you have the wrong idea about us,” Grace said. She locked her fingers together and stretched out her arms. Another wail began from another direction; this one dove into a low, rumbling moan. It was answered by the first one. They both sounded like they were coming closer.

  Menchú walked into the middle of the street.

  “Everyone to me,” he said.

  They came in close to each other. Sal, standing next to Grace, could swear she could see the energy coiled in Grace’s muscles, dying to be set free.

  “Wait,” Menchú said.

  The first thing they saw was a foot. It was like a hoof, but with three skinny toes protruding from it. The leg it was attached to was spindly and hairy, bent at a strange angle—part horse, part spider.

  Then the whole creature lurched into the intersection.

  It had three legs that zigzagged up from the ground to a bulbous, fur-covered body about eight feet off the ground. Somehow stuck on the end of that body was its head, with a face almost like a baby’s, but with a gigantic mouth that hung open, flapping, as if it didn’t have a jaw. It saw Team Three and its eyes narrowed. It let out a low, guttural, mournful cry. There was another answering wail, and the second creature stepped under the stoplight. It looks almost like an ostrich, Sal thought. It didn’t have wings; it had one leg and two long arms that reached to the ground, ending in enormous, seven-fingered hands. But it did have the long neck, the head with beady eyes, a squat beak. If it stood up all the way, Sal thought, it would hit its head on the stoplight. But it carried itself hunched over instead. It opened its beak and let out something between a bark and a chirp. Again. Again.

  For a moment, the creatures just stood there, sizing up the humans in the street. A string of drool fell from the first creature’s mouth and smacked onto the pavement.

  “If they move, you move,” Menchú said to Grace.

  “Got it,” Grace said.

  The creatures shifted. For a moment it looked like they were going to sit down. But they didn’t.

  They sprang forward, howling and hooting.

  Grace went after the ostrich one. She dodged a swipe from its left arm, grabbed onto its right, and vaulted herself up onto the thing’s back. She reached forward, got a firm hold on its neck, and snapped it. The head bucked upward and wobbled, and the whole animal pitched forward and collapsed in the street. Grace le
apt off and landed on her feet.

  The baby-faced creature was still galloping toward the rest of them.

  “Sal—” Menchú said.

  “Already on it,” Sal said. She pulled out her Glock and emptied it into the creature’s face. It staggered back, twitched with every shot, and then seemed to slide over sideways. It panted six times, each exhalation more laborious than the last, and then stopped.

  The rest of the team looked at Sal.

  “What?” Sal said. “We’re back in America. Yippie-ki-yay, right?”

  “Yippie . . . ki . . . ?” Grace said.

  “Forget it,” said Sal.

  “How did you . . .” Liam said.

  “She’s a cop, right?” Menchú said. “I made some arrangements.”

  “Remember in the airport when I said I needed to go to the bathroom?” Sal said.

  “You didn’t need to go,” Liam said.

  She mimed a handoff. Liam shook his head. They passed each other a glance.

  Then they all looked back toward the music shop. The man at the door had seen the whole thing. He looked more terrified than ever.

  “Relax,” said Menchú. “We’re not here to hurt you. We’ve dealt with this sort of thing before.”

  “You don’t have the first idea what you’re dealing with,” the man said.

  “I don’t know,” Liam said, motioning toward the bodies in the street. “I’d say we did all right.”

  “Those are just the little ones,” the man said.

  Sal wanted to ask what he meant. She didn’t have time.

  A groan rumbled through the earth beneath their feet. A shadow fell across the entire block, and there was another of them, the Tornado Eaters, rising up over the buildings down the block. A monumental body atop three thick legs. A huge, distended belly, like a pregnancy gone too long. A triangular, frowning head. No arms. Sal’s eye couldn’t put it to scale. It was either too big, or too close, or both.

  Definitely both.

  A scream filled the enormous sky, filled the air around them. It felt like being electrocuted.

  Sal looked up. It was impossible to say how she hadn’t seen it coming. It was as though she’d forgotten the sky existed, that the sun was out, that the only clouds were far away.