Bookburners: Season One Volume One

by Max Gladstone

  The will is the flame and the flesh is the wax.

  Wujing fired twice into the tiger’s stomach, and fell.

  Chen Juan closed her grip around the candle’s wick.

  The flame died.

  She heard a scream that might have been a laugh, and then was still.

  3.

  Rome. Now.

  Manhunts, in Sal’s experience, resembled wrestling matches: you circled your target and sought openings. Does she shop? Does she stay on the move? Is she a homebody? Any family? Sexual partners? What do you know about her, really?

  That said, Sal imagined any wrestling match she might start with Grace would end in a few painful seconds. Sal had seen gangland bruisers on PCP drop easier than that woman. So maybe the analogy broke down. Though, to be fair, she wasn’t having much more luck tracking Grace than she would have had wrestling her.

  Start with facts: Grace likes books. She speaks more languages than anyone should. She fights. She’s on time everywhere, and throws shade when other people aren’t. Which might suggest a military background, but didn’t answer the question of where she lived, and anyway if you relied too much on guesswork you fell into the old Sherlock Holmes signal-to-noise trap. Did the mailman forget to shave because he was stressed, or because he lost his razor, or because the razor broke? That mud on the bartender’s trouser cuff—really from East London, where it rained at 4:00 p.m.? Or maybe the hose out back of the bar was leaking, and he walked through a puddle while taking out the trash.

  Grace rode an orange Vespa. Fine, so did half of Rome. She dressed well, understated clean-line fashion sans visible labels. Simple haircut. She never drank as far as Sal saw, but then, they’d been on mission most of the time they’d spent together—no sense hunting AA meetings in the Rome metro area.

  The brawling was a lead, at least. Grace trained with Liam sometimes, before and after missions, but Liam, when Sal asked him on the sly, didn’t know if Grace had other sparring partners. Grace’s style wasn’t exactly a style at all—hard strikes and bone breaks, throwing her whole weight to snap a joint or sweep a limb, more ferocity than technique. It looked like a hot, vicious mess, with Grace playing the part of vicious and the other guy in the leading role of mess. Sal spent a week sweeping MMA and boxing gyms, playing innocent. “I’m trying to get my brother’s girlfriend a birthday present, like lessons or a free month or something, and I know she trains, but I don’t know if she trains here. Chinese woman, about so tall, sharp jaw, dark hair, bob cut, fights angry?” Half the gym attendants segued immediately into hitting on Sal before confessing ignorance; the other half just shook their heads and shrugged. A woman at a boxing gym said she knew most of the fighters in the area, and unless Sal meant Sandy Huang, who was a six-foot heavyweight with a shaved head, the description didn’t sound familiar.

  Thanks, but no such luck.

  Sal visited the clinic where her brother lay comatose and sat beside Perry’s bed for hours, watching him, until the attending nurse left to check on a file he hadn’t received. She slid into the man’s chair—his screen saver wasn’t even password-protected, Liam would have had a fit—and keyed as best she could through nasty yellow-black DOSesque prompts until she found a search function. “Chen” produced a few hundred hits. “Chen, Grace”: zero. Did she use her Chinese name on records? Sal checked her own history—records of treatment and a division tag which yielded a list of twenty names when she keyed that in, most marked dead or retired. Menchú. Liam. Asanti. Sal. No Grace. No Chens on the entire list.

  Somehow, in spite of all the getting hurt she did, Grace had never been patched up. Or if she had, there was no record of it here. Was there a separate Vatican clinic for people whose job boiled down to hitting demons very hard in the face? But no—Sal had seen Team One heavies lined up in this very waiting room after a mission. Could Grace’s file be sealed? Maybe, but sealed against clinic personnel? And if Grace’s history was sealed, why wouldn’t Sal’s be, too? They took all the same missions together. Unless Grace was some sort of secret Vatican assassin or something—but if so, why would she be with Team Three? And wouldn’t there have been at least one mission where Grace couldn’t come? Three seemed to be her permanent assignment.

  The nurse cleared his throat, and Sal closed the search. “I’m so sorry, I couldn’t get any reception down here and I’m waiting on an email.” She showed him her phone.

  “You can maybe switch from airplane mode.”

  “Oh. Jesus. I mean, God, ah, this is pretty embarrassing.”

  So: no gym, no medical record. Grace had to be paid somehow, but the Vatican wouldn’t just hand Sal its payroll data. She walked back the long way to the archive, over marble tile and under ceilings painted by Renaissance masters who probably expected the people passing beneath them would have more elevated thoughts than how they could break into their coworker’s apartment.

  Sorry, Michelangelo.

  Then again, she’d read Machiavelli. What was it Asanti kept saying? “Plus the mum chose”?

  “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” Asanti offered when she asked. Sal slumped in Liam’s desk chair and stared up into the Archive’s vaulted ceiling. Asanti adjusted her jeweler’s lamp and the metal armature that held the magnifying glass above the papyrus on her desk. “May I ask why?”

  “It was on my mind,” Sal said.

  Asanti touched a button on the lamp. The light turned ultraviolet, and her nails fluoresced. “Have you ever wondered,” she asked, “if there might be more than one history of the world?”

  “Not exactly.” Sal kicked her legs up on the desk, leaned back, and examined the detritus of Liam’s past. “I mean, I guess there are lots of history books.”

  “Not what I meant,” Asanti said. “The conceptual apparatus we deploy to construct world history from the texts to which we have access, and I use that term loosely, of course . . .”

  “Of course.”

  “. . . assumes that present conditions also applied in the past. You can see traces of this throughout Shakespeare: Romans throw caps in the air and discuss their hose, as if they wore seventeenth-century English fashion rather than togas.”

  “But we know they didn’t.” Sal excavated the desk: interlaced pop science magazines, an Italian Maxim, a printout of 2600. “Don’t we?”

  “Certainly. But given what else we know--” Asanti adjusted the magnifying glass-- “about magic and the occult, it seems likely that the mystical water level, to use Father Menchú’s delightful analogy, has risen and fallen before our time. Events once commonplace are impossible these days. But the human mind does not, as we’ve seen, admit of discontinuities. Kant understood: for experience to function we require an unbroken and uniform stream of time, even if the noumenal world remains beyond our grasp.”

  “Uh-huh.” Liam had dog-eared his 2600 printout; Sal flipped through but couldn’t make sense of the circuit diagrams or the politics.

  “So when the water level sinks, we paper over Camelot and the Yellow Emperor, Prester John and Shambhala and Ravana’s kingdom in Sri Lanka.”

  Sal pushed the magazines to one side and saw, soot-stained and golden, Grace’s copy of Middlemarch. “Does it matter?”

  “If nothing else, it lends some sense to Buffy. All those eons of demon kings in Giles’ books, which nobody knows about and never manifest in the archaeological record: we papered them over.”

  “I meant does it matter for our work?”

  “Obviously the theory has practical applications as well,” Asanti said. “But criticism is its own reward.”

  Sal raised Middlemarch like a surrender flag. “Grace left her book.”

  “She’ll pick it up before the next mission. She doesn’t read save on assignment.”

  “She reads fast, then.”

  “Poor girl would save a great deal of money if she just checked them out of the library. It’s not as though we don’t have the best-stocked collection in the world.”

  “Mayb
e Grace doesn’t like—” Sal pointed to Asanti’s papyrus.

  “Fifth-dynasty scorpion-charmers’ manual. Egyptian.”

  “Sounds like a page-turner.”

  “It’s a scroll. It doesn’t have pages.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “We have a complete edition of The Mystery of Edwin Drood in subsection A, if you want a thriller.”

  Sal frowned. “Where does Grace get the books, then?”

  “Buys them.”

  “She doesn’t strike me as the type to browse.”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Curious, I guess.” Sal took her feet off Liam’s desk, shook the mouse, and logged in as a guest. Grace used a flip phone; she scorned email. Impossible as it seemed, Sal doubted the woman owned a computer. And Liam had set his machine up for guests before Sal joined the team. In which case, who was using it?

  Browser history. Scroll down. Bookseller website. Free delivery. Login. Sal typed G, waited. Nothing. Delete. C instead. Told herself not to hold her breath.

  Autocomplete, ever-helpful, supplied chen-dot-grace-at, with a line of bullets for the password. Nice. Order history. Shipping address.

  Print.

  Two hours later, Sal stood on a street corner staring up at Saint Catherine’s Convent. Gargoyles on the corners, heavy drapes on the windows, a guard at the gate, and friendly-looking German shepherds pacing the yard. And there, on the fourth floor, Grace’s room.

  At least this wouldn’t be easy. Sal hated easy.

  Somewhere. Then.

  Chen Juan woke on a bed of straw, tasting dust and wax. She sat up sharply, with a cry; her body curled into a ball, knees near her chin, arms raised. The skin of her arms looked like skin. She wasn’t burnt. She could breathe. She was—but there had been a span of time where she wasn’t.

  Sunlight streamed through a narrow window. She stood. What she’d taken for a bed was in fact a crate, packed with straw, now open. She wore a shirt and slacks of loose cotton. Her feet were bare, and the floor beneath them stone.

  Outside the window, tile roofs rose and fell like the surface of the sea in high wind, each roof’s corner capped by a dragon. The window faced south, and was high enough that she could see over the thick red walls to the gate across Tiananmen Square.

  She stood in the former Imperial Palace. Central had called her home.

  “Welcome back,” said a familiar voice behind her. “Would you like some tea? You must be thirsty.”

  She turned quickly, already smiling. “Wujing!”

  He sat beside a low table and looked thinner than she remembered—his face drawn, but less grievously injured than she feared. Burn scars rippled his cheeks and forehead, but they had healed well. Aside from those he looked the same as ever. No, she decided. Not the same. He seemed more himself.

  “I’m glad to see you.” He sounded tired.

  Four men in army uniforms stood behind him. She didn’t know them, but they weren’t important. Beside Wujing stood a thick candle in a bone holder. She tensed when she saw it, but the fire burned low.

  “Why is that candle lit?”

  “Chen Juan,” he said. “Sit down, please.”

  “We got him?”

  “We got him. Have some tea.”

  She sat and drank. The army men did not move. They might have been carvings. “I don’t understand.”

  “You were hurt,” he said.

  She read his face. “Hurt badly, I suppose.”

  “Yes.”

  “Burned?”

  “There were burns, but they’ve healed.”

  “How’s Ahsan?”

  “Fine,” he said. “Blind in one eye now. We brought you back to Central, and the scholars have been working on you ever since.”

  The tea tasted of smoke and time. “Why did you bring the candle? It seems ghoulish.”

  “The candle.” He tasted the word. “The candle is part of the problem, and the solution.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Chen Juan,” he said, and leaned forward. Candlelight and sun glinted off the gray at his temples, which had not been there yesterday. “Please, listen to me.”

  “No.” But she did not move. She sat as still as the army men stood.

  “Antopov’s notes show that he thought his immortality would be conferred by a baptism of fire. You ran into his circle. You drank the wax. And then you seized his fire and finished the ritual.”

  She shook her head. She wanted to say something, but she had no words.

  “When you snuffed the candle out, the wax stopped moving, as if the flame was all that kept it liquid. Antopov fell, like a statue. And you just stood there.”

  “How long?” she said. The words were hollow. They must have been hollow: he didn’t seem to have heard them.

  “We thought it was the wax. We scraped it off, but you didn’t wake. Your wounds healed. Your skin was still skin—not like his. But you held still. The scholars think he brought a supply of the final product when he fled Mongolia, an imperfect mixture. He used it to make the candle. It kept him young, while it burned. If he finished the ritual, if he melted those girls, maybe the candle wax wouldn’t run, or maybe there would just be more candle. We don’t know. But you took the flame from him. The candle’s yours now. When we light it, you start to breathe. And you wake up. So do the wax things, of course, but you’re the keystone.”

  Her hand shook. She set down the teacup before she dropped it. “How long?” He wilted beneath her gaze.

  He passed her his newspaper. The date on the front page read: 1933.

  “Five years.”

  He nodded.

  “You kept me under for five years.”

  She stood. The army men started forward. She glared at them, and they stopped. Fire flowed through her heart instead of blood, bloomed in her lungs instead of breath.

  Wujing’s eyes were wet. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t want to risk it. To risk you. Each drop from that candle is a day you won’t get back.”

  “Every day is one we won’t get back.”

  “But yours are more limited than most,” he said. “We’ve tried to save you, all these years. But we haven’t learned how.”

  “You should have asked me.”

  “Perhaps.” He reclaimed the newspaper and folded it. “Perhaps I couldn’t bear to.”

  1933. “What did I miss?”

  “Too much. The Japanese invaded. Their monsters came with them. The Bureau of Official Secrets has been busy. I’ve barely slept in months.”

  “I can help,” she said. “Now that I’m awake again.”

  He set down the newspaper. “That’s not why we’re talking.”

  She should not have listened. She did not want to listen.

  “The Japanese threaten to invade Beiping. To protect the Palace Museum, we will evacuate it south, by rail. That’s the cover story. In fact, we’re moving the entire Bureau collection. For the next few years our efforts will be dedicated to the war, to preventing outbreaks and the fall of cities. I’ve been commanded,” a word he twisted sour, “to halt research and development efforts not directly tied to the war effort. I wanted to wake you, and tell you. It may be a long time before we speak again.”

  “How long?” Strange that her voice could sound so level. The candle flame jumped beside him. “Five more years? Ten? You’ll leave me in a damn crate until everyone I know is old and dead, just to give me a chance?”

  He flinched, but did not look away. She wondered if she could have done the same, if their situations were reversed. “As long as it takes,” he said. “We won’t give up.”

  She ran.

  Four soldiers stood between Chen Juan and the door, but they weren’t ready. They must have expected her to bolt earlier; her initial confusion had calmed them. So when she vaulted over the table and kicked the largest soldier in the throat, the others seemed to move in slow motion.

  She hit one in the face before he could raise his arm to
block. She had never moved this fast; she had never been this strong. She kicked his knee. Arms slipped around her from behind, began to tighten, but she ducked and slammed her elbow into the crotch of the man who’d tried to grapple her.

  The room filled with brilliant light: the candle flame a foot high now and blazing as wax rolled down its sides. Wujing revolved, slowly as a planet, and raised the newspaper. Before she could reach him, he swatted out the flame.

  She was not strong enough to move her arms. She was not fierce enough to move her feet. She stood like a diorama figure. Color ebbed from the world’s edges, and the drain proceeded in. Wujing raised his hand. The army men lifted her like a statue. They straightened her arms and legs. They placed her, gently, on the straw. One of them bled from his mouth and from the nose she’d broken.

  “I’m sorry,” Wujing said.

  She fought to open her eyes, but he closed them. She heard a lid settle against the crate, and then a hammer fell, and time became a stretch of not.

  4.

  Rome. Now.

  Night in Rome is never quiet, nor precisely dark, but there are shadows. At 9:30, the front-gate guard of Saint Catherine’s changed. The newcomer started her shift with a flashlit walk through the garden, then released the dogs and returned to the watchhouse to read a romance novel thin enough that she could hide it under a newspaper if anyone came by.

  The German shepherds prowled among trailing vines and between rose bushes. The larger of the pair pissed decorously on the lawn.

  A dark missile arced over the fence, landed with a thud, and lay still. The larger dog advanced, curious. Whatever this was, it smelled delicious. Tasted delicious, too—chewy, good texture, nice marbling of fat. The smaller dog approached; Dog the First growled, less viciously than she intended. In fact, she felt less driven to do much of anything, save sleep.

  The second dog finished the steak before he noticed the first was lying down. He didn’t think much as a rule, especially when steak was involved. He certainly didn’t think much for an hour after this particular meal.