Bookburners The Complete Season Two

by Max Gladstone

  They heard those skittering noises more than once—apparently there were plenty of spiders still hanging around. Worse, the webbing grew thicker and more frequent the farther into Team Four’s headquarters they went.

  “Marco,” Sal shouted.

  This time she didn’t get an answer.

  Her thighs were starting to burn from the stairs. “How many days does this excuse us from the gym, do you think?” she asked.

  “None.” Liam frowned at an intersection. There weren’t any paths that would lead them closer to the light. “Wait, do you see that?” He played the light over a gap in the stairwell. There was another platform some ten feet below them, and this one led straight to the beacon.

  “You want to jump?” Sal sized up the drop. “That’s a little far.”

  “We can make it. It’s the best way. I can help you down.”

  Sal nodded reluctantly. “Fine.”

  Liam sat at the edge of the abyss, then swung down to hang from his fingertips, the muscles in his shoulders bunching. He let go and dropped. He landed—not gracefully, not quietly, but safely—and motioned to Sal. “Your turn.”

  The stone was slick under her fingers. She eased one leg over the edge, then the other. She tried to get a solid grip, but instead she slid, uncontrolled, and dropped. She yelled as she fell.

  She struck Liam on her way down. He held his arms out trying to break her fall, but instead, both of them reeled and crumpled, then tumbled several more steps before they could stop themselves. Sal rubbed her elbow, her hip, laughing hysterically. “That was not a good idea.”

  Liam stood, his dignity the most injured part of him. “Let’s just keep moving.”

  Before long, they passed through a curtain of webbing and finally reached a room. Or a place that would pass for a room, anyway, if it had walls or ceilings; as things stood, it was more like a collection of furniture perched on a platform mysteriously suspended in empty space.

  From the look of the furniture, the room was something like a dormitory. Rows and rows of short, narrow beds squatted in neat ranks, each with its own neatly folded blanket and a flat pillow. Each one had a little chest at the foot.

  Sal ran a hand along one of the blankets. It was made of coarse-woven wool dyed brown, rough against her fingertips. Quills poked through the fabric of more than one pillow. “I guess Team Four didn’t believe in living the high life,” she observed. “You’d have fit right in, Liam.”

  He shrugged off her little barb. “No shame fitting in with men of principle.”

  Sal sat on a bed for a moment and flexed her toes. “I’m feeling the burn a little too much. Let’s take a rest.”

  Liam sat a few rows away from her, his back completely straight.

  “This place looks like they were expecting to come back any time,” Liam said at last. “It’s waiting for you to lie down and close your eyes.”

  Sal opened the chest for her bunk. It held a robe made from the same fabric as the blanket, a wooden bowl, and a well-worn prayer book. Sal assessed the book, wondering if it would be safe to pick up, to even touch.

  “Don’t,” Liam warned her.

  Before Sal could shape a retort, the book flipped open on its own, the pages flexing like a newly emerged butterfly’s wings. She thumped the lid of the chest closed before it could escape.

  They stared at each other for a moment, their silence punctuated by the tapping sounds of the book trying to escape and fly to join its migrating kindred.

  “Liam,” Sal said at last, “What if that is the library? What if all of their books are up in the air like that?”

  He flexed his hands. “Then we’re in trouble,” he said.

  • • •

  Asanti stopped and stared and said, in a soft awed voice, “The lab.”

  They’d found an area crammed with long tables. Navigating between them reminded Grace of their own Black Archives, before they’d been destroyed—a maze of towers of books. But this maze was made of standing skeletons, towers of distilling equipment, shelves and shelves packed with glass jars, sheaves of dried leaves.

  “Too bad Liam isn’t here to see this,” Grace said. “He’d love it.” She was wearing Asanti’s oversized cardigan; the spider’s poison spray had eaten her own shirt—which she hadn’t noticed until she’d wondered why, first, she felt cold, and second, why Arturo was avoiding looking at her. At least Arturo, looking away, hadn’t seen her blush. And Asanti had offered a loan of the cardigan without being asked.

  Father Menchú snorted. “I’m sure he would.”

  Grace peered into a series of glass jars lined neatly on an iron shelf. The things inside the murky liquid looked like pickled chilies; nothing so interesting as demons. “So is this what you were looking for?” she asked Asanti.

  Asanti was beginning to frown. “There’s no paper here,” she said. “No books or notes.”

  “And no dust,” Menchú added. “Why is there no dust?”

  Grace picked up a piece of equipment. “This looks familiar.” It was the blade of a spider leg, just like the one she’d destroyed. The table was filled with springs and gears, an elegant glass reservoir, even a jar full of crystal eyes.

  “Team Four built those things? On purpose?” Menchú grew ashen. “Why would they do something like that?”

  “I would guess the spiders didn’t attack them,” Asanti said. She pulled open a drawer, and then another one. “I don’t see anything relevant to the Orb. Something here must be able to help us.”

  “Not really.” Grace tapped a flask of smoke. “Sometimes nothing can.”

  Menchú looked away. “Let’s keep looking.”

  • • •

  “Liam.” Sal stopped on the landing in front of him to block his way and crossed her arms. “What’s the problem?”

  “Spiders.” Liam stared out at the dim twinkles—probably more spiders just … waiting. “Falling into an Escher picture. Being trapped by Team One. Looking into Team Bloody Four, as if anything good could come of that.”

  “Beyond the usual stuff. You’re acting weird, Liam. I know you.”

  “How do you deal with it?” Liam burst out.

  “Deal with …” Sal looked at him blankly. “You’ve been dealing with magic longer than I have. Why ask me for advice?”

  “You had a demon in you.” Liam exhaled through his nose, like a bull about to charge. “And now you’re just … okay?”

  “Would you prefer I not be okay?”

  “But how? How can you know it’s gone? How do you know it won’t come back?”

  Sal rubbed her palm along her hip, then switched her flashlight to the other hand. “I don’t, I guess. But I don’t know if I’m about to be eaten by a giant spider made out of some creepy-ass Erector Set, either. I don’t know if I’ll be hit by a meteor while I sleep. Or if I’ll trip on my shoelace and break my neck falling down all of these—Christ, why are there so many stairs?”

  “What is that smell?” Liam asked, his nostrils flaring.

  “Are you trying to say my—” Sal stopped short. “Wait, what is that smell?”

  It got stronger the farther they went down their branch of stairs. It smelled like everything delicious Sal had ever eaten, all at once.

  They spiraled down to a landing and found themselves in a banquet hall suspended in the middle of nothing.

  There was a long table with high-backed chairs along both sides. Places were set with porcelain and gleaming silver cutlery. The table groaned with food: loaves of bread, steaming tureens of soup, a whole roasted lamb, enormous bowls of pasta, dishes of olives and spices, roasted artichokes, peas and mint, platters with tumbled piles of cheese, a sauce that smelled of anchovies, and glistening towers of pastry and candied fruit.

  All of it was fresh, as if a gracious host—or an army of servants, more likely—had only just laid the feast and ducked into another room. Sal leaned over the table and breathed in deeply. It smelled rich and companionable; it smelled like celebration. She
held her hands over the soup, and the steam warmed her hands. “Still hot.”

  “I wouldn’t touch it, much less stick it in my mouth,” Liam warned her. “Either this food has been sitting here for around two hundred years, or else …”

  Sal sighed. “I guess you’re right.”

  Candelabras flickered every few feet around the space, heavy with candles so tall they might have been only lit a moment ago.

  Sal eyed the candles. “I wonder, though.” She blew out one of the candles and plucked it out of its seat. It came away and stayed unlit, exactly like an ordinary candle would.

  “What are you doing?” Liam asked.

  “Grace.” Sal put the candle in her pocket. “If we could find a way to burn her candle without using it up, just like this …”

  Liam shifted uneasily, but then he nodded. “That’s a nice thought.” He waved toward the golden light, brighter than ever; they were almost there. “We should really keep going, though.” He headed toward the stairs leading up and onward.

  “STOP!” Sal grabbed Liam’s arm.

  The spider crouched in the narrow walkway between the two and their destination. The golden light was tantalizingly close now. From time to time dark shapes moved in front of it, casting shadows across the whole structure.

  “Maybe this one doesn’t work?” Sal eased a few inches closer to the spider. Its crystal eyes tracked her carefully, and its mandibles twitched. “Maybe not.”

  “Why isn’t it attacking us?”

  A flock of books swarmed by. There must have been several hundred, swooping in wild patterns. One got stuck in a web; it fluttered desperately, keened piteously, but it couldn’t free itself.

  “The books. Maybe it was only after the book,” Sal said. “The first one only attacked Grace when she took one of the flying books out of the air, right? So maybe we can just … pass by it?”

  “Please,” Liam said, with a sweeping bow, “ladies first.”

  Sal stepped a little closer, moving at a glacial pace down the stairs and toward the spider. Everything seemed cold and oppressive: the riffling-pages flutter from the books, the tightness of her bra band around her ribs, the bright spots where the light shone off the spider’s gleaming joints.

  The spider leaped. Sal flinched at the movement, but then she realized the spider was creeping away from the stairs, and toward the book trapped in the web. Sal wobbled, suddenly dizzy; the mechanical insect hung from a strand attached to the edge of a step. Except it hung out and up, and gravity shouldn’t work that way. Sal squeezed her eyes shut and took a few deep breaths to fight the feeling she was going to fall up and off the stairs. It’s fine, she told herself, just like you’re not going to suddenly fall off the earth when you’re lying on your back and staring up at the stars.

  Liam made an inchoate sound of disgust. The spider had reached the book. It bit the poor paper creature; the venom in its reservoir bubbled and grew lower. The book twitched wildly, then went limp; now it was just an ordinary book again.

  The spider cut it free and then, holding the book in its forelegs, scuttled away along the web. It headed straight toward the golden beacon.

  Liam and Sal stared at each other. “Did that thing just …”

  “Yeah.”

  “And then it …?”

  “Yep.”

  Liam sighed heavily. “Well,” he said, “at least we can be pretty sure we’re headed toward the shelves.”

  4.

  Voices came from up ahead and a shadow loomed over them, eclipsing a good chunk of the beacon. “Marco?” Sal called, tense.

  “Polo!” Father Menchú swept toward them and peered intensely into their eyes, as if signs of demonic impersonation would be that easy to spot. “Thank heaven you’re here; we were starting to wonder what had become of you. You had no trouble? No spiders? Or anything else?”

  “We’re fine,” Sal said. She tested her elbow and winced. “More or less.”

  Sal and Liam followed Father Menchú into the light. As they approached, objects resolved out of the brightness: massive curves of brass covered in scrollwork, nestled within one another to form a single ornate mechanism. Each arc supported an orb made from one of various stones; the smallest the size of a barrel, ranging all the way up to the size of a compact car. The whole contraption was easily as big as a soccer field.

  “It took you a long time to get here,” Menchú said.

  “It’s only been, what, an hour? Hour and a half?”

  Menchú’s eyebrows twitched. “It seemed like three to us. And my watch says—well, my watch says we’ve been here for twenty hours now. Much help that is.”

  Liam pulled his phone out. “Dead,” he said, disgusted.

  Sal set her hands on her hips. “Either way, if Team One were going to come in after us, we’d have seen them by now.” So much for being rescued.

  “They’d be smarter to close the door and nail it shut.” Grace stalked the perimeter, glaring at the machinery in search of something to punch. Nothing suggested itself, though the dim lights of more half-seen spiders hung thick and heavy all around them.

  Asanti seemed to be on an entirely different mission from the rest of the team; one that was going much better than theirs. “Look at this thing! Can you believe it?!” She gesticulated at the machine, so delighted Sal worried she might burst out of her skin from joy. “And all these years it’s been sitting right under our noses!”

  “What has?” Liam asked her.

  “Dee’s orrery,” Asanti said. “A model of the solar system. And a famous one—I read about this in John Dee’s memoirs, but we thought it had been destroyed!”

  “Yeah,” Liam said, though much less enthusiastic. “Great.”

  The golden glow that had drawn them shone from the center of the orrery, where the sun would be. It rested in a bed of ornate and impenetrable machinery, presumably meant to drive the heavenly spheres. The sun was as big as Grace’s convent bedroom, and shone with a warm, steady light. They could see the zigzagging stairs clearly for hundreds of yards around, like all the wicker from a basket pulled apart and tossed in a pile.

  Sal might have preferred not getting such a good look. Her stomach heaved. She tried to refocus on the task at hand: books. Somewhere in this topsy-turvy place, there had to be an archive of notes or books or schematics. But her eyes kept snapping back to the orrery, no matter how her stomach felt about the matter. “It’s magic, right?”

  “Of course.” Asanti beamed, just as bright as the object of her attention. “That’s what the records say. And even if we don’t believe them, when Team Four disappeared, there wouldn’t have been a technology to create that light. Much less any technology that would still function hundreds of years later!”

  “Is this thing related to our Orb?” Sal asked. “Can you learn anything from it that might help you?”

  Asanti shook her head. “Made by the same people, maybe. But they’re not for the same things.”

  As they watched, the orrery’s moon slid into a new position. There was a click, which Sal felt mostly in her bones and teeth. A ripple of change passed through them. All around, the stairs writhed and twisted. Some broke apart and reconnected into brand new constellations. Some vanished entirely; the distant shine of the candelabras from the dining room turned toward them and then was gone.

  The metaphorical light bulb flashed above Sal’s head. “Oh,” she said. “The orrery’s controlling the stairs. Maybe we can control the orrery.”

  “Maybe find the way out of here,” Grace said.

  Liam knocked on the orrery. It rang like a bell. “Assuming Team One will even let us out after this. Grace is right, they’d be smarter to nail the door shut and forget about us.” He swung from one of the great circles—the one suspending Saturn—and disappeared around the other side.

  “Maybe we can still find that missing library.” Sal looked up at the spiders. “The spiders must be taking the books there. The flying books. Christ, that sounds like a scre
en saver.”

  Grace glowered at the spiders, every one of them out of reach. “How do you even control this thing?”

  “I’ve got your control panel right here!” Liam called.

  The team gathered. Liam stood before a cabinet adorned with an unbelievable array of levers, wheels, and switches. Each was neatly labeled in Latin with the name of the heavenly body it controlled, with the planet’s symbol etched next to it.

  Grace sat down cross-legged and pulled a novel from her bag. “I’ll wait here while you figure it out,” she said, but almost as soon as she did, the book began to flex its pages under its own power. “What the—”

  The book fluttered away to be with others of its kind. Grace watched it fade into the distance. “You have got to be kidding me.”

  “What did the planets look like two hundred years ago?” Sal asked. “Maybe if we turn it back things will be normal around here.”

  Liam shook his head. “You’re thinking of the stars, not the planets. The planets just go round and round, there’s no ‘what they looked like two hundred years ago.’”

  “Well then what would you try, hot shot?”

  Asanti broke in. “Conjunction—when the planets line up in a neat row?”

  Sal nodded. “Sure, let’s try that.” She studied the control panel for a moment. “Brace yourselves,” she warned, and then she began pulling levers and spinning wheels, more or less at random.

  The spheres above them moved easily, as if the device had just been built. All around, stairs flickered and changed. There was too much saliva in Sal’s mouth. She felt nauseous, and she wasn’t alone; Menchú moaned unhappily and Asanti hid her face in her hands.

  Sal swallowed down the vertigo and focused on the task at hand. She got Mercurius and Terra lined up quickly, but after that she had trouble getting Venus directly between them, and she wasn’t even sure where Luna was supposed to be. In front of Terra, or behind it? “Pssh. This is so annoying!”

  “Here,” Liam said, pushing her aside. “You can’t expect to do it all at once—you have to put them in place one by one. I swear I’ve played a million games with puzzles like this. Ah, the old Liam did, anyway.” He eyeballed the solar system, pulled a lever a notch, flipped a switch. Slowly the planets drew closer and closer together, a wobbly line from the sun clean out to Saturnus.