“It’s probably not dangerous to anyone unless you go inside. Still, I think I should talk to Shah. Just to give her a fair warning.” Menchú stared at Angiuli’s espresso cup. The antique china saucer had chipped. “Or I suppose I should talk to Monsignor Fox and have him talk to Shah, so I don’t ruffle any feathers.”
Angiuli nodded, visibly relieved. “Whatever you think is best.”
Menchú paused. “Asanti tells me that in the future we may have to do slightly more—aggressive investigation, in order to repair the Orb. And I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how important it is to our mission that the Orb be repaired.”
Angiuli waved a hand in dismissal. “You have all proven yourself to me time and again, Arturo. I have perfect faith that God is guiding you and protecting all of us.”
Menchú nodded slowly. The next part was going to be tricky to navigate, he knew, but he had to ask. Vatican politics could be deadly to the unwary. “One more thing,” he said. “How have the the, ah, the formalities progressed?”
Angiuli laid a heavy hand on Menchú’s shoulder. It felt warm even through his shirt and jacket. “Relax, Arturo. There is a committee in place, and of course its deliberations will seem to take a decade. Or perhaps they truly will take a decade. It wouldn’t be the first time. Who can say what they will decide? Perhaps I’m not the right man for this job, and I shouldn’t become too comfortable. Perhaps someone with more ambition and vision will be located.” He smiled a thin, apologetic smile. “I can’t say I’d be sorry.”
Menchú laughed, once, an unhumorous bark. “The Black Archives are no place for the ambitious. You know that as well as I do.” He tried to settle a mask over his face: a calm, confident, smiling mask that reached no deeper than his skin. “It is just a formality, yes? Even if it takes some time to become official, there is no reason to believe the committee would introduce a newcomer to lead us.”
“We must wait to see and keep faith, Arturo.” Angiuli smiled beatifically. “God’s will be done.”
Bookburners
Season 2, Episode 3
Mistakes Were Made
Brian Slattery
1.
“I don’t like it,” Menchú said.
Asanti sighed. “We’ve been over this before.”
“And we’ll go over it again.”
“I suspect we will,” Asanti said.
Asanti and Menchú sat across from each other at her desk in the center of the restored Black Archives. Her acolytes, she was sure, could hear their voices rising. She watched as Menchú took a deep breath, calming himself down, collecting his thoughts.
But they were arguing about magic—in a way, about the mission—and Asanti knew how personal it was for Menchú. He blamed himself for destroying his hometown, as she’d known soon after meeting him. It had driven him away from magic, toward the Society. She wondered if she would ever force Menchú to the point where he would lose himself in the heat of the argument and say something he couldn’t take back. She wondered if she, too, would ever reach that point. She made herself a promise, right then, that she would do everything she could to prevent that from happening. That she would always try to back off, to remind herself that she cared too much about Menchú and the rest of the team to create a rift between them.
“There is a fundamental problem with the Society using magic to fight magic,” Menchú said.
“Team One uses magic all the time,” Asanti said. “And so do we.”
She gestured toward the Orb. The manual she and Frances were using to decipher it was right in front of her—Menchú had interrupted her mid-paragraph—and she ran her hands again over the characters on the page. Her initial excitement at its discovery had led to a nagging frustration, as the manual had proven to be, well, hard to use. Should I have expected otherwise? she wondered. No. But still: There she was, a polyglot, an expert in her field, in possession of one of the best libraries about magic in the world, and still far too much of the knowledge contained in this book was out of reach. She wanted to call her dissertation advisor, but he was long gone; she missed him. She wanted to contact Perry, as she thought he might know something, but was unsure even how to reach him.
“The Orb is different,” Menchú said.
“Is it? It seems from this book that it can do far more than we ever thought it could. It was built for us to use.”
Menchú sighed again.
“Arguing with you point for point about this is a frustrating exercise,” he said, “when all I am really saying is that I disagree with you on a general principle about the reason for the Society’s existence—its mission. Until very recently, I thought you accepted that mission.”
“I do accept it.”
“Then what has changed?” Menchú asked.
Now it was Asanti’s turn to pause. What, indeed?
“The Hand got too close,” she said.
“That was a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence,” Menchú answered. “It will not happen again on our watch.”
“How can you be so certain?”
“When was the last time a demon was in the Vatican?”
“I don’t think that’s the right way to think about it,” Asanti said. “You don’t hear the chatter like Liam and I do. There are rumors that the balance is shifting. That bigger things are coming. And I don’t think we’re prepared.”
“And you think experimenting with magic will change that?”
“Do you have any better ideas?”
“No,” Menchú said, “but that’s irrelevant. It’s not necessary for us to have better ideas. It’s necessary for us to contain magic.”
“I know that,” Asanti said. “Please know that I know that.”
Menchú paused again.
“Just please tell me,” he said, “that you are doing this because you really think it will make our work better. Not because you are following some personal impulse.”
“That is not what I am doing,” Asanti said.
“But I’ve seen it in you before,” Menchú said. “Do not deny that it’s there.”
“It’s there,” Asanti said. “It is.” Which was when she saw her opening. She sharpened her tone, moved in to slit this argument’s throat. “But I would never jeopardize you, or anyone on Team Three, or anyone here at the Vatican, for a passion project. I thought you knew me better—and had more respect for me—than to suggest that.”
She watched, with a little satisfaction, as Menchú’s expression softened, became conciliatory.
“I didn’t mean to suggest that,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Asanti said. “And I know this conversation isn’t over. For now, I’m just asking you to trust me.”
“I do,” he said.
“All right. Then let me get back to work.”
She returned to her book. Shook her head. Menchú was right. The Orb was a puzzle to fix, a problem to solve, and it let her lean into the curiosity that had brought her to study magic in the first place, that had brought her to the Vatican. She wanted to know how it worked.
And the visit behind Team Four’s door had put another thought in her head: that she had to find out just what might have happened to them. It occurred to her that the official statement on Team Four—that they had been excommunicated, removed from the Church—did not in fact suggest that the team had been destroyed. There was no record of its members being killed. They just vanished. Which could, of course, mean that they’d been executed; maybe their bones were rotting underneath a new apartment complex somewhere, or scattered on the bottom of the Mediterranean. But excommunication could also mean that they had left. That other people—descendants, disciples—were carrying on their work. Which meant someone out there might know what she wanted to know: how to do more with the Orb, how to use it better. How to use magic better.
“Dr. Asanti?” Her assistant Frances’s voice; Asanti hadn’t heard her approach the desk.
“Yes?”
Frances walked up to her de
sk from the stacks. She was holding a long, opened envelope. “You know what we were talking about the other day? About reorganizing the vaults?”
Asanti nodded. That was the code phrase she’d already developed with Frances for the kind of research her superiors might frown upon. “Yes,” she said.
“Have you ever heard of the Thaumatological Symposium?”
“Only a little,” Asanti said. “An academic conference about magic. Seems to be mostly fringe anthropologists and folklorists with a smattering of amateur cryptozoologists. We’ve never been invited, and it’s invitation only.”
“Well, I seem to have an invite to this year’s conference in Russia.”
“They must not know where you work.”
“Not yet. Benefits of having just taken the job.”
“Any chance you can get Liam and me on your invite?”
“It does say I’m allowed to bring guests.”
“Well, register us and see what happens.”
“We’ll go together?”
“Of course,” Asanti said. “Maybe you’ll find something that helps you in your research into the Orb. How is that coming along?”
“Slowly,” Frances said. “Very slowly. Though it seems clear that when you were using it simply to detect magic, you were only barely scratching the surface of what it was capable of.” She smiled. “Like using a laptop as a coaster.”
“Well, let’s see if we can change that,” Asanti said.
The paperwork arrived the next week. Plane tickets were purchased, car arrangements made. Asanti packed her bags with mounting excitement. She could sense that Menchú was still a little dissatisfied with the way their argument had ended. He seemed to bristle a little when she told him where she was going, and whom she was taking. He didn’t really want her to go. She ignored him.
2.
The three representatives from the Vatican to the Thaumatological Symposium drove six hours southeast from Moscow, down a highway that was lined with what seemed like endless trees. Liam, behind the steering wheel, kept trying to make conversation. Asanti was game for a while, but after an hour or two she felt that maybe they’d run out of things to say, for the time being. She remembered why she’d become a librarian in the first place. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Liam, or people in general. She was sociable enough, she thought. She loved parties. But there was something to the silence, too, to just looking out the window. She had never been to Russia before. She could ask Liam what his recent favorite book on tape was anytime. She also found that she wasn’t particularly interested in Liam’s apparently quite extensive knowledge of Russian dash cam accident videos on YouTube. Soon enough, though, he moved on to talking about something else. She noticed Frances trying to keep up with Liam for maybe forty-five minutes until she too fell into silence in the backseat, then into slumber. It took Liam a couple minutes to notice.
Their exit put them on a smaller road through a town that looked like it had been spared communism, or perhaps it was too small for communism to bother. Then they passed through farmland, small low fields behind houses built for winter, chickens in tiny enclosures, here and there a few sheep, a few cows. A large electric fence rose to their left, and kept running alongside the road for a good thirty seconds until they reached a metal archway with the name of the hotel in curved Cyrillic letters. From the road, they could see only the driveway, rising and falling with the land over a small hill. They followed it and descended into a rolling valley of grassland, dotted with trees. In the middle of it rose an enormous complex of buildings, composed of three intersecting rectangles—the scale was hard to grasp. There was nothing near the complex but more grassland and a sprawling parking lot. At first the buildings looked windowless, until they got closer and saw that they were almost all windows, tinted a shade of dark brown.
“It’ll be nice and cheery in there,” Liam said.
Frances chuckled. Good, Asanti thought. She’s awake.
A valet waited at the entrance to the resort’s main building to take their car. The doors slid aside for them to enter. The people bustling inside filled the enormous lobby, the walls of which were painted just the right color to absorb cigarette smoke. A tang hit their nostrils, like the smell of a used furniture store. The man who checked them in gave them a winning smile and a few pairs of old keys. They moved over to the check-in table, where a line of people shouted their own names and waited for their programs. The back of a head in front of them reminded Asanti of someone she knew, but before she could pin down the resemblance, someone taller blocked her view.
Behind the check-in table, the staff looked worried. The woman who put down her cell phone to take their names—Yolanda, a conference organizer, according to her own name tag—frowned when she saw what organization they represented. She picked up her cell phone again and barked orders into it as she retrieved their paperwork.
“Just a moment,” she said, in English with an accent Asanti couldn’t identify. She rose and vanished into the room just behind them, and came back with a man in rumpled green suit whose slouch couldn’t disguise how tall and broad he was. He looked like a lumberjack who was ashamed of himself, Asanti thought. He extended his hand.
“I am Kapos Halmi,” he said, with half-lidded eyes. He attempted a smile but couldn’t quite manage it. He seemed strung out between anxiety and exhaustion. “Welcome to the Thaumatological Symposium. I wish I could say it was a pleasure to at last meet representatives from the Vatican, but it is not. I must tell you, Dr. Haddad, that if we had known the identity of your new employers, we would never have extended an invitation to you. And it is only through regrettable organizational oversight that we didn’t bar your guests. You aren’t here to shut us down, are you?”
Liam laughed. Kapos shrugged.
“I’m not joking,” Kapos said.
“No, no,” Asanti said. “We’re here to attend the conference just like everyone else.”
“I hope I can believe you.” Kapos nodded. He produced three sets of forms. “You will need to sign these as first-time participants.”
“What are they?” Asanti said.
“The … the first set of papers is a confidentiality agreement, promising that you will not discuss anything that happens here beyond trivial matters outside of the conference itself.”
“What do trivial matters entail?”
Kapos sighed. “That is why the agreement is so long. It gets longer every year. If you’d care to read it, you can, but suffice it to say that defining what is trivial and what is not at this conference is still a matter of some debate, though it’s best to proceed with caution.”
“I take it you’re not going to check us in unless we sign this,” Asanti said.
“Everyone has to sign them,” Kapos said, gesturing to a large stack of forms on a table behind him. “That and the next form, which is a waiver.”
Frances was already halfway through that one. “You know, I went skydiving once, and the waiver was shorter than this one.”
“This form also gets longer every year,” Kapos said.
Liam just gave Kapos a long stare.
“Look,” Kapos said. “I don’t have to tell you that the very subject we are discussing at this conference is secret and dangerous. Your own larger organization does not even publicly recognize your team’s existence. For my part, I am concerned with the continued success of the conference, so legal considerations must be accounted for. As long as we are speaking candidly, I should tell you that many conference participants were not pleased to learn that you are attending this year, and I have had to be very diplomatic in assuring them that you’re not here on a …”
“Witch hunt?” Liam said.
“I was looking for a better term,” Kapos said.
“There’s a better term?” Liam said.
“Drop it,” Asanti said. “Let’s just sign already.”
“Thank you,” Kapos said. He seemed less anxious, which only made him look more exhausted. “I sincere
ly hope that you enjoy the conference. I heard an expression once that the purpose of a conference is to have two new ideas and meet two new people. I hope that turns out to be true for you.”
“Indeed,” Asanti said.
• • •
In front of the podium in a small conference room, a man in a brown suit demonstrated how he’d learned to float his pen. There it was, suspended in the air in front of him.
“This magic is real,” he said. “It took me a very long time to learn how to do it.”
He extended his hand palm upward, below the pen, clearly in position to let the pen fall into it. He released the pen and somehow dropped it anyway. Then he passed around photocopies of pictures he’d taken of his failed attempts. Exploded pens, melted pens. A pen that just wouldn’t write anymore; he had instantaneously dried up all the ink. The demonstrator crawled into the particulars of the effects of his experiments on the pens—and in controlling the magic by keeping it small—making all kinds of suppositions about the nature of magic from them. At one point, he caught Asanti’s eye, gave her a wary, hopeful glance. She couldn’t decide if he was trying to impress her or hoping she wouldn’t bust him. It was all so quaint. It made Asanti realize that the demonstrations at this conference weren’t going to be where the action was.
At the presentation she went to next, Professor Izquierdo, an older scholar from a university in Mexico City, dressed in a plaid shirt and suspenders, began a discourse about the history of magic in the world. He was an anthropologist and, from the caustic asides he gave during his talk, it was clear that the academic pursuits that brought him to this conference had probably also sidetracked his career to the point of near-ruination. He explained, with a small grin on his face, that he’d been given tenure a couple decades ago in a move the department head and deans of the university now regretted. Asanti liked him right away.
“There are many,” Izquierdo said, in an acid tone, “who say there is nothing to these fairy stories we find, that there is no knowledge about the world to be gained. They have no idea, do they?”
Bookburners The Complete Season Two Page 9