by Jim C. Hines
“She has another lover,” Lena whispered.
“She’s existed for less than twenty-four hours.” It had taken days for Lena to begin to bond with me, for my desires to come into conflict with Nidhi’s.
That conflict was the key. The tension between our desires gave Lena a degree of freedom. Every time she argued with one of us, whether it was about the ethics of killing in self-defense or whether Douglas Adams should have stopped his trilogy after the fourth book, she lit up inside. It was hard to stay angry with someone who took such obvious joy in being able to disagree.
“I would love to see Harrison’s face when he finds out.” My moment of schadenfreude passed quickly. How could this have happened? Given Harrison’s possessiveness, Deifilia wouldn’t have sought another lover on her own. At least not deliberately…“Lena, your personality began to change even before we—”
“I prefer ‘evolved,’” Lena said. “But you’re right. Sex isn’t the key. Frank Dearing owned me long after his body lost its potency.”
“Wei, when Harrison collapsed, did Deifilia take a large insect from his body? A cicada?”
“She wanted to protect him, and to keep anyone from taking control of his weapons.”
The cicada which was telepathically connected to the Army of Ghosts. Lena had created a degree of freedom for herself by taking another lover. Deifilia had found an entire army. An army that wanted only two things: to live, and to destroy.
Nidhi summed it up with surprising succinctness. “Oh, shit.”
The automaton was centuries old, charred and cracked from the unimaginable heat of Isaac’s battle. Fingers of carved walnut hung limp, hinged with pegs fitted so precisely they were invisible. The body and limbs were oak, taken from a tree that had stood for more than a hundred years before falling to the bite of the ax.
The jaw creaked open, shedding chips of black-and-gray carbon. “You’d be risking your life,” said Isaac Vainio.
He didn’t understand. How could he? He was human. Had been human, rather. Before he pulled his dying flesh into the body of a wood-and-metal monster, a golem built by one of the most powerful magicians in history, all to stop a madman.
I could feel the life slipping from the wood, like water leached away by too much sunlight. The automaton was dying, and Isaac with it. Had it been a tree, the leaves would be brown, and the branches would have snapped in the slightest wind.
Gutenberg had known. He understood my nature far better than Isaac. Better than Nidhi. Perhaps even better than me. I loved Isaac Vainio. Loved him as much as Nidhi, though in different ways and for different reasons. I couldn’t let him go.
My fingers tightened around the burnt limb. With my other hand, I pulled myself up to touch the carved, featureless face.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“I’m not sure.”
I reached for the memory of oak, and the feel of Isaac’s arms around my body, my mouth on his. He had tasted like coffee with not enough cream, just as I had doubtless tasted of waffles and strawberries, but neither one of us had been willing to break off that first frantic kiss.
My fingers sank into the automaton, and I felt my own life fighting to inhabit the dead wood. Cells long-since dried and broken struggled to heal, and then to grow as I forced myself deeper into the broken body of my lover.
And then we were one. The libriomancer and the dryad, joined in a way I had never known, not with Nidhi, nor with Frank.
Nidhi’s love had given me strength and power. Now Isaac’s love gave me the strength to use that power in a way I had never imagined.
If you ask Isaac when we first made love, he’ll say it was two days later, in the damp grass of his backyard. Which isn’t as romantic as you’d think, given the mosquito population here in the U.P. They didn’t bother me, but he kept squirming and slapping until I laughed and rolled us over, climbing on top of him and driving all other distractions from his mind.
But what we did beneath the cloudy sky that night was merely the completion of what we began in that dying wooden body.
“CALL GUTENBERG,” I said. “Tell him what he’s facing.”
“What is he facing?” asked Nidhi.
“Hell if I know.” The Ghost Army wouldn’t care about restoring Victor Harrison, which meant Jeneta should be safe. They cared only about their own return. “Bi Wei, when Deifilia restored your two companions, what did she do to their books and their readers?”
Her grief surged through me, confirming my guess. “How did you know?”
“We’re very clever. She destroyed them, didn’t she?”
“Chu Zao was the first to be brought back. No sooner had Deifilia drawn him forth than she used the insects to destroy the book. His reader was taken away to become another wendigo. What remained of Chu Zao…his body lives, but my friend is gone. I tried to stop Deifilia, and her insects almost killed me. By the time I awoke, she had done the same to another of us.”
“They’ve tried to possess Porters through the years, but even when it worked, they were trapped in a damaged body with an even more damaged mind. They tried to take you, but you fought back.”
“It appears I owe you thanks,” Bi Wei said. “Deifilia would have torn my own book to pulp if you hadn’t taken it, and I would be dead.”
“Wei, are the other books the same as your own? The same appearance, the same format and title?”
“The Yang/Soul/Story, yes.”
There was no equivalent English word, but I saw in her thoughts the untranslatable characters from the cover of her own book. The Yang/Soul/Story of Bi Wei, safeguarding her spiritual soul. “I have an idea, but I’ll need names.”
She saw what I had in mind, and gratitude flooded through our shared connection. In that instant, I knew the names of her fellow students as well as she did.
Raw fury followed a moment later, so sudden I cried out. Lena yanked me away, and Nidhi slammed the book shut. A part of me cringed to see such an old book handled so roughly, but it worked. My connection to Bi Wei weakened, though I could feel her horror and guilt as she realized what had happened.
The Army of Ghosts was still inside her. I hadn’t sensed them through our connection, but they had been listening from the shadows of her mind. “I need McKinley’s Beauty, and we’re about to have visitors.”
“No more magic,” Nidhi insisted. Lena moved to stand beside her, their shoulders touching. Jeff simply looked puzzled.
“Deifilia restored two more of the students of Bi Sheng. And then she destroyed their books. It ripped their minds and souls apart, leaving the bodies as vessels for the Army of Ghosts. She’s going to do the same to the rest.”
“The ghosts—the devourers—were deranged,” said Lena. “How is Deifilia controlling them?”
That made me pause. “I have no idea.”
“Call another libriomancer,” Nidhi insisted. “Let them do the spell.”
“They don’t know the books we need.” I could see the titles in my mind, but I lacked the words to explain them, even to a fellow libriomancer.
I touched the duct tape square on my shirt. “Toni, how much of this did you hear?”
“Enough.” Strange to feel her voice buzzing against my chest. “Gutenberg’s team is at the mine, but it will take time to work their way through the tunnels. The ghosts are already weakening their magic. Isaac, we’ve got incoming, and they’re playing dirty.”
“What’s going on?”
“Most of them are flying high and fast. Aimee says they took some of ’em out at the bridge, but the damn things didn’t even slow down. Looks like they’re heading your way.”
“Understood.” Where was the book? I had returned it to the reserves shelf, which had fallen when the dragon attacked.
“I’m going up to intercept them. Let’s see these fuckers try to ignore me.”
“Be careful.” There, beneath an overturned filing cabinet. The spine was ripped, and the pages were beginning to tear free. This needed
professional repair. I couldn’t do anything but press the pages carefully back into place and hope for the best. As I finished gathering my things, fire bathed Smudge’s body. He crouched low, watching the sky. “I think we’re out of time.”
Jeff ripped a leg off of a table. “Get out of here. I’ll watch over Guan Feng and give you as much time as I can.”
Three metal falcons streaked into the library. Lena stepped past me, and her bokken whipped through the air to rip the wing off the first. Two more went after Jeff.
True falcons shouldn’t have been able to hover and dart about like hummingbirds. Within seconds, Jeff’s hands were bleeding where they had cut him with their knifelike beaks. Screams in the distance meant the rest of Deifilia’s forces were closing in fast.
I pulled out my shock-gun, dropped to one knee, and braced my arm against the shelves. My first shot missed, but my second sent a falcon into a tailspin. Jeff smashed it, then took out the third falcon on the backswing.
“Go,” said Jeff. “I’m gonna call in a few friends, see if we can’t teach you Porters how to fight.”
“Thank you.” I handed Nidhi my keys. These things would shred her rental car like tinfoil. “Please tell me you know how to drive a stick.”
Oily black smoke streaked the windshield over Smudge. He was keeping an eye—all eight of them, actually—on the metal mob chasing us down the road. He would have melted right through the dashboard by now if not for the trivet secured to the plastic.
We drove with the top down so Lena could protect us from aerial assaults. She sat in my lap, one knee in the seat. In her left hand, she swung her bokken at anything that came within range. With her right, she fired lightning bolts into the sky.
I did my best to ignore the thunderclaps going off two feet from my head and read. I couldn’t save the two books Deifilia had already destroyed, but if I could concentrate, I might be able to create backups of the rest.
From the moment I touched the pages, I felt the characters trying to reach into my head. The conflict of the title character Honour, who preferred to be called Beauty. Her brother-in-law’s fearful warnings about the woods. Her father’s shame as Beauty chose to give herself to the Beast to save his life. The one thing the characters shared was the need to escape, whether it was the hardship of their new lives in Blue Hill, the father’s guilt, or the Beast’s castle. And my mind would provide them that escape if I wasn’t careful.
I didn’t have time for careful. I grabbed another book and turned it diagonally, trying to pull it free without destroying both books in the process. Beauty was a hardcover, but the books I needed were larger, and if the binding completely failed, the book would fall apart in my hands. I slid the book out and tucked it behind the seat.
“Where are we going?” Nidhi asked.
“Water tower,” I said. “Toni’s team ought to be able to help us out, and the tower’s built on a hill, so it should be more defensible.”
Lena shifted her weight and smashed a beetle that had landed on the trunk.
“Watch it,” I protested.
Nidhi yanked the wheel, swerving around an overturned truck. A wendigo was clawing at the truck’s door, and I heard screams from inside. Nidhi slowed long enough for Lena to shoot both the wendigo and the truck. Hopefully the rubber tires had insulated the driver.
“Hold on.” Nidhi lurched over the curb and into a parking lot. We wove between cars, barely missing the cart corral in front of the grocery store.
“Where did you learn to drive?” Lena demanded as we zoomed around the back of the store and down the grassy hill beyond.
“Isaac’s always bragging about what this car can do,” she said tightly. “I wanted to see if he was exaggerating.”
I could feel the Triumph’s traction spells kicking in, fighting to cling to the wet grass and mud. Even as the magic won out and we climbed onto the road, the book distorted my perceptions, turning black steel into exhausted horses, their coats streaked with sweaty froth.
“Isaac?” Lena fired at another falcon, set her bokken down, and squeezed my shoulder. “Stay with us.”
There were too many books to create. The longer I held Beauty open, the stronger the voices grew. If the ghosts got hold of me now, I doubted I’d be able to resist them. I needed to end this.
I spread the book on my lap. Given the battering it had taken, the hardest part was overcoming my own revulsion at what I was about to do. I gripped half the pages in each hand, prayed for forgiveness from whoever might be listening, and finished cracking the book’s spine. I tugged the covers until the endpaper began to tear free, then plunged my hand back into the Beast’s library.
My vandalism allowed me to stretch the pages an extra three quarters of an inch. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to speed the process along. The crack of thunder faded. Nothing mattered but the next book.
“Isaac…” Lena grabbed my hand, then pointed up the road as we crossed the railroad tracks and saw the war waging in front of us.
“Oh, my God.”
The water tower had fallen onto the road. It looked like a giant jellyfish, the body partially crushed under its own weight, the metal tentacles bent and stiff. One of the legs had smashed a minivan, nearly cutting it in half. The water had flooded the parking lot of the restaurant on the opposite side of the road, pushing two cars into the front wall.
Toni Warwick stood uphill on the broken concrete foundation of the water tower. She appeared to be holding off a small swarm of bugs with a drinking straw and a yo-yo. A team of libriomancers flanked her, fighting a small herd of rusty metal beasts. Lawrence Hume held a bulky rifle of a design I didn’t recognize, while Whitney lay on the ground flinging pennies at their attackers. Even from here, I could see that her leg was broken.
One of her coins bounced off the head of a wolf, who slipped and rolled into the path of a charging moose.
“Unlucky pennies,” I guessed. The moose trampled the wolf, which didn’t get back up. “Nice.”
Nidhi pulled off the road and killed the engine. I scooped Smudge onto my shoulder, grabbed the books, and snatched the keys from the ignition. I hurried to the back and popped the trunk. The Triumph had better protective spells than any of us. I shoved the books inside and slammed the trunk.
Lena handed me the shock-gun. “How many were you able to get?”
“Ten, including Bi Wei’s.” Beauty had fallen apart when I tried to pull out the eleventh book. It wasn’t enough.
I counted five fallen beasts, but others were circling the three Porters, trying to get up the hill to surround them. In addition to the wolf and the moose, there were several deer, two dogs, what looked like a fox, and a handful of rats. Sparkles on the ground showed where Toni had taken out many of the bugs.
I stopped to shoot at a metal snake which was trying to circle around to flank them. My third shot took it down, but attracted the attention of its friends, and the metal mob that had pursued us from the library was closing in fast.
“I hope you have a plan, Vainio!” Toni shouted.
Lawrence used the confusion caused by our arrival to fire at another wolf. The metal body began to hum like a tuning fork, the sound rising in pitch until my eardrums threatened to rupture. Then the wolf simply blew apart. Shrapnel dented a deer, but it regained its balance and kept coming.
“I need a hand. ‘Eat me.’ End of chapter one.” I yanked Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland from my jacket and flung it toward Whitney. I gave Nidhi a boost up the hill and started to follow, but the moose had recovered from its collision with the wolf and was charging toward me.
“Mine.” Lena sprinted past, swords raised. Just before she collided with the moose, she jumped to the right and stabbed one of her swords into the joint where the front leg met the torso. The move took her off balance, but she turned her fall into a roll and bounced to her feet, gripping her remaining weapon in both hands and knocking a rusty dog aside.
The moose staggered. Sprigs of green sprouted f
rom the shaft of the sword. It was the same trick she had used with the toothpick and the metal beetle back in my office. Her bokken grew through the moose, entangling and paralyzing the inner workings before it could reach me.
“Incoming,” Whitney yelled, pointing toward the swarm of birds and bugs flying up the road. She turned her attention to my book, reached inside, and yanked out a small glass box.
I scrambled up the hill to snatch it from her hand. Inside was a small cake. Currants spelled out the words “EAT ME.” I collapsed on the dirt, opened the box, and set both it and Smudge on the ground. “Time for lunch, buddy.”
A swarm of rats had cut Lena off from the rest of us. I readied my gun, but before I could aim, Lawrence shouted, “Watch the trees!”
A pair of wendigos bounded toward us. I rolled and hit one in the leg. Lawrence shot the other, causing the ice that armored its skin to shatter. I didn’t know what kind of weapon he was using or where he had gotten it, but next chance I got, I was definitely looking that sucker up in the Porter database.
On the road, Lena jumped onto the back of the dying moose and smashed a rat off of her leg. Another sank metal teeth through her shoe. She cried out, then kicked off the shoe and rat both. More rats climbed up the moose. I grabbed another book, hoping Whitney or Lawrence could control the rust magic better than I had.
I didn’t get the chance to find out. With crumbs of magic cake stuck to his mandibles, Smudge charged into the fray.
I had cared for that spider since high school, and he had saved my life more than once. He was more than a partner. He was family. And despite all we had been through, the primitive, reptilian part of my brain wanted only to get as far as I could from the flaming spider I had magically enlarged to the size of a station wagon.
Apparently magic rats felt the same way. They jumped off of the moose and backed away.
They weren’t fast enough. Smudge snatched the first one up without breaking stride. His mandibles punched through the metal body like an old-fashioned can opener, and then he was moving toward the next.