by Jim C. Hines
According to his findings, those frequently reread books were less powerful than books read an equal number of times by unique individuals. I remembered his math being rather fuzzy in several spots, but he had suggested that if the Porters wanted to increase the power of books, encouraging more people to read a wider variety would be roughly five times as effective as pushing them to reread their favorites.
But what if you didn’t have a large pool of potential readers? What if you had only a few copies of the books in question and couldn’t risk printing more, for fear that your enemies would find out?
How many times had that book been read and reread through the centuries? How many times had it been repaired to survive, or did Bi Wei somehow strengthen the physical book?
I squinted out the window, trying to guess where we were going. I was almost certain we had taken 28 after the bridge. We stopped for gas a short time later, but the sign outside told me nothing beyond the cost of cigarettes and unleaded gas.
The sun was setting when we finally left the highway. I had started to drift to sleep. The change of speed jolted me from a Wonderland-style nightmare in which I fled through an endless library, my footsteps echoing on the marble floor, trying to escape from invisible pursuers. I was relieved to be free of my dream, up until I remembered where I really was.
We drove into a hilly, wooded area. I felt the road turn to gravel, and the truck’s jostling made the millipede around my neck twitch and dig in tighter.
“Let Harrison feel like he’s in control,” Lena whispered in Gujarati.
“He pretty much is.”
She swung a leg over my lap to straddle me. She kissed my ear, then brought my bound hands toward her. She pressed my fingers against a hard lump beneath the skin of her forearm, like a dislocated bone. Before I could ask what it was, she tensed her arm, and a sliver of wood poked through the skin to jab my fingers. “Take it,” she whispered.
I took the tip of wood and pulled. Lena gasped, but with her body blocking the mechanical cat’s view, Harrison would hopefully take that as a sound of passion rather than pain. I slid a thin wooden stiletto about eight inches long from her skin.
“How?” I asked.
“Flesh. Blood. Wood. They’re all a part of my body.” She kissed me again. “August Harrison is as arrogant as any Porter, and it’s going to cost him dearly.”
Harrison pounded a fist on the window. “I said knock it off with that foreign talk.”
Lena winked at me, then helped me to tuck the knife into my sock. I can only imagine what Harrison thought we were doing.
The truck stopped, and a man I hadn’t seen before unlocked the back. Lena exited first, then offered me a hand as I climbed down from the tailgate. I leaned against the truck and tried to rub the stiffness from my thighs. I smelled water, though I couldn’t see the lake. The cold, fresh air tasted like home.
We were in a parking lot edged with wooden posts. Seven small brown cabins were spread out before us, identical in shape and size. Maple and spruce trees shaded most of the lot.
A pair of metal rats perched like gargoyles atop an old freezer humming outside the closest cabin. The freezer’s curved lines and heavy steel handle, along with the orange rust along the bottom, suggested the thing was probably as old as I was. Such freezers could store enough venison to feed a small family for months. Or preserve the hides of murdered wendigos.
“More friends of yours?” I asked, nodding toward the other cars.
“The followers of Bi Sheng bought this place two months ago,” announced Harrison. The cat bounded down and waddled along behind him like a bad-tempered and extremely pointy duckling.
A path beyond the cabins led down to what appeared to be sand dunes. The U.P. was full of these small lakeside hotels and campsites. The building marked as the office had a “Closed” sign, and the windows were dark. But people were emerging from the other cabins. I spotted two more carrying the oversized books. Others held rifles pointed in my direction. I got the impression that they knew exactly who and what I was, and that any one of them would be happy for an excuse to pull the trigger.
“Is this the dryad?” asked one of the men.
“I told you I’d bring her, didn’t I?” Harrison snapped.
“You also told us the libriomancer was no threat, that you’d have them both long before they discovered you and your stolen magic.”
Harrison sniffed and turned to address the group as a whole. “I brought the dryad. Let’s get on with it.”
“Where are the others?” someone else asked in Mandarin.
“They’re safe,” Guan Feng answered in the same language. “The van was destroyed. They’re making their way back. The Porter and his friends were stronger than Harrison anticipated.” She checked Harrison, as if making sure he wasn’t paying attention. “They were able to report back to Gutenberg. He sent one of his automatons.”
The man with the rifle swore. “How much do they know?”
“I don’t know. I was too busy saving this bèn dàn.” She gestured toward Harrison.
I bit my lip to keep from smirking as I made a mental note of that one. If I survived, I could teach Deb how to call someone a dumbass in Mandarin.
“All right, you’ve busted your asses to catch us,” I said. “What happens next?”
Guan Feng looked down at her book. When she spoke, her words were soft and reverent. “Now the dryad will help us to restore the Bì de dú .”
Eight months into our relationship, I returned home to find Nidhi sitting on the couch, her hands folded over a book in her lap.
When I sat down, she stiffened like she was fighting the urge to pull away. “I’m sorry I was late.” I had been volunteering with the local food bank, encouraging the fruitfulness of their gardens. I thought I had told her we were picking and packing today, but maybe I’d forgotten. “Nidhi, what’s wrong?”
“It’s not you. Not anything you’ve done.” She shifted to face me, putting more distance between us in the process. It felt like she had physically struck me. “The Porters have encountered a handful of dryads over the centuries, but the things you can do don’t match their accounts. I’ve been reading about dryads ever since we found you.”
She set the book on the coffee table and slid it toward me. It was an old library book, the spine heavily creased. She had tucked an origami butterfly into the pages to mark her place.
“Nymphs of Neptune?” The hairs on my neck and arms rose when I touched the book, like I had entered a haunted graveyard. I had to force myself to read the opening pages.
The words made me ill. I could get through brief passages, but the longer, descriptive sections left me dizzy and confused. I struggled to focus as the words blurred and doubled, and when I looked up, it felt like the house was tumbling around me. I squeezed my eyes shut, waiting for the effects to pass. “What is this?”
“The Porters who found you believed your tree was magical, created through libriomancy. I think they might have been right.”
I closed the book and read the back cover. The summary text didn’t hit me as hard as the story had, at least not physically. “You think I’m a character from this book? A slave?” I whispered.
“A fantasy.” She answered so quietly I barely heard.
I wanted to destroy the book, to rip it apart and burn the pieces. Instead, I carefully set it back down and tried to absorb what I had read. If I was one of these nymphs—and both my reaction to the story and the description of the nymphs’ powers suggested I was—then Nidhi hadn’t been helping me. She had been molding me, transforming me into her perfect lover. I dug my fingers into the cushions, feeling the rage expand in my chest, a scream demanding release.
I had never experienced anger like this when I was with Frank Dearing. He had wanted an obedient, compliant companion, and so he had denied me my anger. He couldn’t have known. He hadn’t noticed or cared that I was…incomplete. What else had he taken?
And what had Nidhi kept fro
m me?
“Why?” Humans asked the same questions. Why am I here? What’s my purpose? But my question could be answered. James Wright had deliberately written these nymphs into his book, describing every curve in meticulous detail.
I was here to fulfill the needs and desires of my lovers.
“We think someone pulled an acorn or sapling from the book,” Nidhi said. “I doubt they even realized what they had done. If it was a fluke, an untrained accident, they probably scared themselves and ran away, leaving you to grow in this world.”
That’s why I had been alone when I awoke.
“I’m so sorry, Lena.” This angered her, too. I could see it in the tightness of her body.
I refused to cry. “What will you do now that you know what I am?”
“I’m not sure. Nobody has the right to…to control another person like this.”
“But I’m not really a person, am I?” My hair, my skin, my favorite flavor of ice cream, everything about me was a reflection of her. I was a fantasy. I had more in common with the airbrushed centerfold of a men’s magazine than I did with a real human being.
I stormed away to our bedroom and slammed the door. I could hear Nidhi crying, and part of me longed to comfort her. Instead, I clung to the anger, nurturing it like a sapling. What if she sent me away? My next lover could be someone like Frank. I might never experience this kind of hurt and anger again.
When Nidhi joined me, hours later, I was sitting amidst a circle of her comic books. Ridiculously clothed women stared up at me from the pages, bodies contorted into bone-bending poses that better displayed their exaggerated curves.
“If you leave me, what then?” I reached out to turn the page of a recent issue of Catwoman. In one panel, the breasts straining to burst from her leather bodysuit were larger than her head, and her waist was thinner than her neck. “Who will I be passed to next, and what will I become?”
Nidhi didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. My anger was nothing but a reflection of her own conflict, meaning she hated this just as much as I did. And dammit all to hell if that didn’t make me love her more.
She sat down beside me, kissed my hair, and whispered, “Huun tane prem karuu chuun.”
“I love you, too,” I said automatically. Whatever I was, those feelings were real to me. “When I was born, I looked for the other dryads of my grove. For my sisters.” I picked up a Red Sonja comic. “I’ve finally found them.”
THE OTHERS FELL IN behind us as we walked deeper into the woods. I counted eleven wendigos and twenty-three humans, not including August Harrison. Far too many to fight, even if Harrison hadn’t swiped my books.
How many ghosts walked with us? At least ten of my captors carried books. I thought of Bi Wei’s magic ripping through me. She had been alone, trapped within her book. What might they do together if they were freed?
“Who were they?” Lena asked, pointing toward the wendigos.
“Some are volunteers,” said Harrison. “The students of Bi Sheng assign one reader to each book. The readers’ magic is too weak for the Porters to notice or care about, but they’re trained to use that magic to maintain the life of their books. Often, their friends and family are recruited to serve as protectors. I just made those protectors stronger.”
He brought us to a small, circular clearing. Fresh stumps marked where other trees had been cut down to create space around the oak in the center. How long had they been preparing for this?
“You remind me of my son.” Harrison pulled my ratty old copy of Star Wars from his back pocket. He must have grabbed it from my jacket. “Always certain you’re smarter than everyone else, that only you have the answers.”
He ripped the book in half, then flung it into a puddle. Insects flowed down his leg to chew the pages into pulp.
I had owned that book for seventeen years. I couldn’t remember how many times I had read it; I had stopped counting after forty-three.
“Easy,” Lena whispered. She slipped an arm through mine to stop me from doing anything stupid.
I nodded slightly. This was what he wanted. To prove his power over me. There was no other reason to destroy my books. Even if I managed to get my hands on one, his millipede would stab its blade through my spine before I read a single sentence.
As my initial anger passed, I noticed something interesting: I wasn’t the only one glaring at Harrison. Several of his companions were frowning, including Guan Feng. One man turned away in disgust.
“Bi Wei is waiting.” Guan Feng walked toward the tree, turning her back on Harrison, so she missed the way his jaw tightened at being upstaged. She crouched at the base of the tree and carefully set her book into a depression among the roots.
“What exactly are you expecting me to do?” asked Lena.
Harrison straightened, visibly regaining his composure. “Two months ago, Isaac lost his physical body. He entered an automaton, transforming himself from flesh and blood to magic, just as the survivors of Gutenberg’s attack did so many years ago. And then you accomplished something none of the students of Bi Sheng have been able to do, though they’ve tried for more than five hundred years. You pulled him back. You recreated his body.” He waved at the tree. “Feng will guide Bi Wei’s ghost into the tree. You will make her human again.”
Lena approached the tree. Four rifles snapped up to point at her, and the wendigos snarled. The millipede tightened around my throat. Lena simply shook her head. “I saved the life of my lover, and it almost killed me. What makes you think I can restore a stranger from a book I’ve never read?”
“The magic is the same,” Guan Feng said. “You recreate your human body each time you emerge from your tree. The tree holds the pattern of your human form, just as this book does for Bi Wei.”
She was paraphrasing my own reports about Lena. Harrison must have shared my private files with them all. “What do you get out of this?” I asked him.
“That’s none of your concern,” he snapped.
“Maybe I’ll offer your friends a better deal,” Lena said lightly. “Isaac and I will do everything in our power to restore Bi Wei, and in return, they’ll stay out of the way while I kick your ass.”
“After so many centuries, do you think they’re going to trust a Porter and his slave?” Harrison asked. “They need me. I can give them the location of every Porter archive and network server. I can provide personnel files on the Regional Masters, or the psychological assessments suggesting who in Gutenberg’s organization could most easily be turned against him.”
“None of which will bring back their dead,” Lena pointed out. “If they want me to try to help them—”
“This isn’t a negotiation.” A portion of his magical hive poured off of his body and flew onto mine. Metal feet poked through my clothes, and tiny barbs tugged my skin. “The only question is how much pain you’ll put your lover through before you cooperate.”
Lena stepped toward Harrison, and suddenly a hundred metal stingers were stabbing my body.
I’ve read a lot of books where people get tortured. Conan the Cimmerian was unbreakable, enduring whatever his captors inflicted through sheer, testosterone-fueled barbarian rage. The Jedi from Star Wars could separate their minds from their bodies, surviving torture through mental discipline. In Feist’s Riftwar books, torture led the character of Pug to a magical breakthrough, making him more powerful than ever.
What few of those books ever bothered to truly explain was how much torture hurts! I tried and failed to keep from screaming. My muscles were rigid. I tried to physically pull the bugs away, tearing cloth and skin, only to have their hinged legs reverse and dig into the meat of my fingers. I clenched my fists, but that only drove their stingers deeper.
I tried to stand, though there was nowhere I could run to escape. Even as I pushed myself upright, they crawled into my shoe and stung the bottom of my foot, making me stumble. Others crawled up my pants legs to attack the skin behind my knees.
I had no books, nor could I
have concentrated long enough to use them if I did. I could hardly breathe, let alone read. The knife Lena had given me wouldn’t do anything against these bugs. I did manage to scoop a rock from the dirt and hurl it at August Harrison’s head between spasms. I missed, but the gesture made me feel a tiny bit better.
My muscles began to give out, and I curled into a ball, covering my face with my hands and praying they wouldn’t crawl into my ears or…into anything else. As the assault dragged on for what felt like hours, I thought about the wendigo outside of Tamarack. He had fallen into the same agonized position right before he died.
“Enough,” said Harrison.
The insects stopped moving, but it still felt like the barbed slivers of metal were thrusting obscenely into my skin, an echo of pain that refused to end. I gasped and blinked tears from my eyes. Lena was walking toward the tree, escorted by two wendigos. Her fingers sank into the tree. The roots curled around the book.
Guan Feng started forward, but an older woman caught her by the shoulder. Neither spoke, but the subtext was easy enough to read. Guan Feng was terrified. She brought her hands together, fingertips touching her chin, as if in prayer or meditation. She paced slowly, each step careful and deliberate, but it didn’t ease the tension in her body. She never took her eyes from her book.
Lena reached deeper, stepping into a parody of an embrace with the tree.
This was my fault. I looked at Harrison, at the hybrid wendigos he had created with frozen chunks of skin, and fought to keep from throwing up. Whoever Lena helped them create, whatever Bi Wei and the others did once they were restored to this world, I was the one who had given them the key.
I started to push myself to my hands and knees, but a series of warning stings killed that idea. Instead, I curled tighter and slipped the wooden knife from my sock, transferring it to my sleeve.