Bookburners: Season One Volume One

by Max Gladstone

  Grace’s face closed like a door. Her nostrils flared. Sal had seen her look calmer while strangling a demon. A muscle at the corner of her jaw twitched. She smelled of sweat, ash, and fury.

  Sal wondered, in a distant, academic way, what she would do if Grace decided to hit her.

  Grace slammed her book down on the table, turned, and marched out of the archive.“Pizza for four, then.” Liam thumbed speed dial.

  Sal looked from him to Menchú to Asanti, but found no answers. So she left.

  2.

  Huangpu River. Then.

  Wujing led the briefing on the barge. The strike team lounged on benches, drinking tea, smoking. The barge creaked around them. Outside, the motor churned. Chen Juan sat in the back; she’d changed at the dock into more comfortable grays—boots and slacks and a long-sleeved blouse. She drank over-steeped tea and wished it would dull the aftertaste of chloroform.

  The projector screen showed a pale, dark-haired man in late middle age, high cheekbones, broad eyes, mustachioed, with a touch of beard at his chin. A strangler’s humor curved his generous lips. “This,” Wujing said for members of the strike team who didn’t already know, “is Professor Yuri Antopov, a White Russian émigré and former advisor to von Ungern-Sternberg, the Blood Count of Mongolia.” The slouchers straightened. They knew the stories; none had seen him in person, of course. The agents they sent north returned in pieces. The Blood Count had sent a suit made from one’s skin, complete with a tanned face mask and an invitation to a masquerade ball in Ulaanbaatar.

  “Antopov fled south after von Ungern-Sternberg fell. For years he operated with Green Gang protection in Shanghai’s French Concession under the name Alexandrov, concocting new opium additives. He has been, in some ways, a model citizen. We did not know of the connection between Antopov and Alexandrov until an intelligence transfer from the Concession’s GRU—coordinated by Officer Chen.” He raised a hand to her, and she saluted back like she’d seen Americans do in movies; the strike team laughed. “Antopov used his Green Gang contacts to rebuild his Mongolian workshop. We believe his research is directed toward, ah . . .” Wujing trailed off, and looked at the floor. He’d seen the evidence with his own eyes, time and again, but sometimes Grace doubted he would ever truly believe their work.

  “He’s a Bathorist,” she said, to spare him the embarrassment. “He’s buying people to render alive for tallow. He believes this will help him achieve immortality, or something like it. And now we know the location of his workshop.” Chen Juan finished her tea. “Unfortunately he knows that we know—so he’ll step up his plans, and kill his hostages soon. We have to move fast.”

  “We’ll go in from the waterfront,” Wujing said. “The rendering operation takes a great deal of space. It’s most likely in the central stockroom, here.” The projectionist changed slides, replacing Antopov’s sneer with the warehouse floor plan. “We’ll secure the dock first, and storm through these loading doors.”

  Chen Juan nodded. “I’ll go in from the second floor before the assault.”

  “Impossible.”

  “I don’t think so. If I jump from the building next door—”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  The strike team turned sideways on their benches so they could watch Chen Juan and Wujing at the same time. Ahsan chuckled. “We have to get the hostages out,” Chen said. “We don’t know what he’ll do after we attack, except that he’s a monster and monsters don’t like to lose. Give me twenty minutes to save lives.”

  Wujing crossed his arms. “Fine. But I don’t want to risk your being caught in the cross fire. Once you have the hostages out, leave—unless we’ve given the all clear.”

  “You don’t want me riding to your rescue?”

  “I want you safe.”

  “There’s no such thing as safe,” she said. “But I’ll take care.”

  Vatican City. Now.

  Saint Peter’s Square was as good a place as any to stomp and sulk. Sal, hands in pockets, shoulders slumped under her jacket, dodged tourists and stomped through posed photographs with muttered apologies. The Basilica dome towered. Crosses were everywhere. Best architecture in the western world, or at least the showiest. There is the Pope’s balcony, a passing tour guide said in Spanish. Or had she said, There is the Pope’s hat?

  At least there wasn’t an appearance scheduled today. Back home, Sal had checked the weather every morning before getting dressed. Here, she checked the papal schedule. But you couldn’t dress for tourists—only suffer them, or not.

  “Sal!”

  Menchú’s voice.

  She considered storming on; a large Japanese family was lining up for a group shot with the Basilica in the background, and if she timed it just right she could ruin the photo. If she was having a bad day, shouldn’t everyone?

  She stopped beside a pillar and waited for the priest to catch up.

  “I don’t ask for much,” she said while he caught his breath. “I know you all keep telling me to be patient. But I have been. I’ve learned the rules, and kept them, and I can’t catch a break with her.”

  Menchú took a handkerchief from his inside pocket and mopped his brow. It was cool for a Roman afternoon, but with Roman weather the modifying phrase mattered.

  “I mean, I don’t even want to talk about it,” Sal continued. “Grace is a private person, sure—you’ve all told me that at one time or another. And we’re in this together, five against the world. So we do need to learn to give one another space.”

  Menchú folded his handkerchief and replaced it in his pocket.

  The Japanese family’s toddler son escaped his mother and sprinted toward the camera, arms extended. Mom handed the baby to Dad and ran to bring the toddler back; he wouldn’t let go of the cameraman’s—his uncle’s?—arm.

  “Why?” Sal asked when she couldn’t stand Menchú’s silence any longer.

  “Why what?” Menchú replied.

  “We should be elite, shouldn’t we? The best in the world. Asanti is, sure. And Grace, I guess. I’ve never seen anyone who can take or give a beating like that woman. But Liam should be what’s-his-face from that Hackers movie, the blond one, and you should be I don’t know, Father Teresa and I should be Sam Spade with better clothes, and we should all of us speak thirty languages and know kung fu.”

  “It would make some missions easier,” Menchú allowed. “Do you know anyone like that?”

  “No.”

  “Neither do I.” The toddler started crying. Mom lifted him. “People are strange. You never know how they’ll respond to what it is that we do until they meet the other world for the first time. Many people break. Some forget. Some become enchanted—they chase after the monsters. Some fight back. You’ve met all kinds since you started working with us. No way to know who will do what in advance. We’ve always recruited from survivors.”

  “Is that how you found Grace?”

  Mom sang, and the toddler stopped crying. She blotted his cheeks with her sleeve, then led him back to the family.

  “Let Grace be Grace,” Menchú said. “She’ll be fine. So will you. She just needs time.”

  “Something’s been off between us ever since we met,” Sal said. “I want to fix it. This kind of tension between squadmates is dangerous. I’ve seen it go bad before.”

  “Grace would never endanger the mission, or any of us. Trust me.”

  “We need to get this sorted before it’s a problem. I should . . . talk to her, I guess. Where does she live?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “Seriously?”

  Mom took the baby from Dad, who knelt and offered the toddler a chocolate wrapped in foil. Mom scowled. “She’s a private person,” Menchú said. “Talk to her on the next mission.”

  “When we’re on a mission she’s either reading and doesn’t want to be disturbed, or she’s hitting rotting meat monsters in the face with large rocks, in which case I’d rather not bother her.”

  “You’re still new.”


  “I’ve been here six months.”

  “That’s new for Grace. She’s a lifer. She’ll come to you when she’s ready.”

  “Or the mountain could go to Muhammad.”

  “Grace’s quarters,” Menchú said, “are a secret. If you pursue this, you might attract the Church’s attention—and I can only protect you so much.”

  The toddler opened the foil, stuffed the chocolate in his mouth, and smiled with dirty teeth. Uncle, still kneeling, aimed the camera.

  Snap.

  Pudong. Then.

  Chen Juan landed so lightly on the warehouse roof that she didn’t startle the roosting pigeons. They shifted their wings and glared at her with evil eyes. Around her, under her, Pudong sweltered and stank through the summer night, Shanghai’s ugly cast-off skin, lit by red lanterns and the moon. Back west across the river, the Bund squatted, smug as a city on fire. Someday someone would burn it down. Even marble would burn, if the fires were stoked hot enough.

  She spidered over rooftop tiles to a latched-shut window and peered through. Empty hallway ten feet below. A row of closed doors, each with a flap in the base. The rooftop windows that should have looked into the closed rooms had been painted black from the inside.

  Spread-eagled, Chen Juan poked her head over the roof’s edge. By mutual agreement, an oil lamp pretended to light the alley, and a single guard pretended to watch the shadows it cast. He smoked—just tobacco, she thought, but she couldn’t smell for sure from this distance.

  The second hand of her watch ticked round the face. She didn’t have time for more reconnaissance. No way through but in.

  She slipped the latch on the first window, lowered herself into the hall, dropped to a crouch, and listened. Behind each padlocked door she heard shallow breathing. Were the captives asleep? Not drugged, she hoped. Doors blocked both ends of the hall—the first bolted and locked, the second merely latched. She listened at the second door, and when she heard nothing, edged it open. Straight shot through shadows down a stairwell to the back door where the guard waited, smoking. Perfect.

  She returned to the first cell door. Antopov must have spent the Green Gang’s money on mystical paraphernalia, muscle, and human beings; he certainly hadn’t spent any on locks. Chen Juan’s mother had taught her to open locks like these when she could barely hold a pick: tension lever, exhale, hook pins and rake and twist. The latch popped. Behind the door, the breathing stopped. Limbs scrambled on straw: the person inside drawing back into the corner, like a scared rat.

  Chen Juan wanted to be sick. She’d never felt the way the person trapped here felt. She could imagine, though.

  She opened the door.

  The girl—the woman—wore a sackcloth dress, and had large green eyes and long thin limbs that had been slender once. She curled in the corner on straw, knees under her chin, hands curled to claws. She was paler than she would have been if she had been outside recently. When she saw Chen Juan her mouth slacked, and confusion colored the fear in her eyes. “Sto?”

  “Menya zavoot Grace,” she said. The woman, thank small mercies, looked whole: hands battered from pounding the door, wan about the face, bruised on the cheek, but not cut, not burned, not yet. “I’m here to rescue you. But you need to be quiet. Can you walk?”

  The woman nodded.

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Days. Weeks?”

  “Do you know how many of them there are?”

  “No.”

  “Wait,” Chen said. “I’ll get the others.”

  The next cell held a Fujianese girl who was worse off. She’d fought harder. When Chen Juan opened her door, she pounced. The girl was strong, but she wasn’t fast, and Chen wrestled her down with little trouble. “I’m here to help you.” She knew the look in the girl’s eyes: trust waiting for an excuse to turn vengeful.

  Altogether there were eleven prisoners; several rooms held two. Mostly girls from Fujian and Jiangsu, and a few White Russians, taxi dancers who’d made the wrong enemy. Chen supposed she herself would have been the twelfth, with Antopov, conducting the ritual, being its thirteenth participant. Foreigners seemed to like thirteens for some reason. One round of the stars plus one. Two minutes left, said her watch.

  Gunfire erupted from the waterfront. She swore. Wujing must have started early.

  “Come on,” she said to the prisoners.

  The stairwell remained empty. The women followed her down. Behind the doors to the main stockroom, guns fired, men screamed, and a high, reedy voice laughed.

  Ground floor.

  The door opened as she reached for it. The smoking guard paused, shocked, hand halfway to his pistol. Chen Juan hit him in the knee and in the throat, and he fell back, and did not rise. The alley was still. Gunfire didn’t raise alarms in Pudong after dark.

  And there was gunfire—pistols and automatic weapons. She listened. Cries in Chinese. Those could be Antopov’s men or hers. She thought she heard Wujing’s voice. The hostages hesitated in the shelter of the warehouse.

  She should lead them to safety. That was the plan. Get them to the motor launch and rendezvous with Wujing back at Central.

  But someone had started the attack early, and after four minutes Wujing still hadn’t given the all clear.

  Dammit.

  You have my back, and I have yours.

  “Go,” she told the hostages. “Down to that streetlamp. Turn left. Run straight for the docks. There’s a motor launch waiting. Give them this.” She reached beneath the collar of her jacket and produced her cross. “They’ll know it’s from me.” The girl who’d tackled Chen Juan upstairs seemed the most calm, so Chen handed her the cross. “I have to help my friends. Go.”

  They went. Chen relieved the fallen sentry of his gun. She hadn’t brought a weapon herself: they were unwieldy for second-story work. Best use what you found to hand.

  She heard another scream from the stockroom.

  She counted breaths until the hostages disappeared around the corner. Four. Five.

  She crept down the hall and edged open the stockroom door.

  Light dazzled her. She smelled hot wax and burnt hair. Antopov she recognized from photographs, though none of the photos had shown him hovering a foot off the ground and cackling. Three goons took cover behind an enormous lidded iron pot, the purpose of which Chen tried not to ponder, and they fired at Wujing’s team.

  The team, for their part, did not seem concerned by the goons. They were too busy wrestling with sculptures made of wax.

  The wax things bubbled up from a trough at Antopov’s feet and took shape as they advanced: eight-legged first, then four, then apelike, galloping toward Wujing’s commandos with wax mouths open in silent screams. They left bubbling puddles in their wake.

  “Come to me,” Antopov said in Russian, and laughed. Chen Juan had heard that laugh before in similar scenarios, most recently in Harbin. Normal people, in her experience, did not laugh that way. Sanity tended to mellow the tenor register.

  She edged into the stockroom. Antopov hovered, she saw now, before an enormous carved-bone candlestick, upon which rested a candle as thick as Chen’s own thigh, lit. When Antopov gestured with his long-nailed hands, the flame leapt and the wax monsters moved. “You come to me, in my house, as if I were a common criminal. My blood is noble, and I have burned in secret fires. I have summoned you, and I will melt you.”

  A wax gorilla tackled Ahsan and they rolled together. Ahsan was strong, and broad, but when he punched the pasty creature, melting wax clung to his hands. The gorilla dripped onto him, into his eyes, into his mouth, and he screamed. Wujing ran from his cover to kick the gorilla in the face. One of Antopov’s goons took aim.

  Chen Juan dropped him with two shots to the back and one to the head.

  Before the others could turn, she shifted aim to Antopov and fired three more times. Two for the center of mass, and one to the head just in case.

  Wax fountained from Antopov’s trough and snatched the bullets
from midair. The hovering Russian turned to her, roaring with fury. His goons took aim. Wujing saw Chen Juan in trouble, raised his own sidearm, fired. One goon fell, the second turned—and a wax tiger pounced, tumbled Wujing to the ground, and caught his face in its jaws.

  Wujing screamed.

  So did Chen Juan. She ran for Antopov, gun still in hand, and leapt toward him, shielding her face with her arms.

  She was heavier than a bullet. A curtain of hot wax covered her skin, her clothes. It burned, but did not stop her. In an instant she was through, and fell into Antopov, hands around the man’s legs, dragging him to earth against the obscene weightlessness of his magic.

  The Russian cried out as he fell, and hit the floor. Chen climbed onto him, ignoring the pain from her burnt skin, the stink of her singed hair, and the sickening foreign taste of wax in her mouth.

  He twisted serpentlike beneath her, bent 180 degrees from the waist, and lunged to strike the bridge of her nose with his forehead. She fell back, and he was on her—fast, too fast, the candle flame behind him towering into a column of light, licking the rafters. She clawed his face and tore him, but instead of skin, long strips of wax came away beneath her nails, baring more wax beneath, the color of blood.

  “Too late,” Antopov said, cackling. His teeth were yellow and his tongue was pink. “The will is the flame and the flesh is the wax. The mind is the mold and the meat is the clay.”

  His hand grew large and heavy, and he struck her face. His fingers puddled against her cheek, wax smearing to block her nose and mouth. His other hand became a snake, twining around her arm. His limbs pulled like melted sugar when she recoiled, but they did not let her go. The rafters were aflame. Wax ran and bubbled over her skin. Wujing struggled to his feet, head still caught in the tiger’s jaws, fighting as he suffocated. Ahsan lay still.

  Chen Juan clawed at her mouth but could not breathe. Black spots danced between her and the world, and those black spots had faces in them, and the faces were all mouth and laughing with Antopov’s inhuman cadence. She stumbled, regained her feet, fell against the candlestick. Her hand came away wet with melted wax—a quarter of the massive candle had melted since she entered the stockroom.