Bookburners The Complete Season Two

by Max Gladstone

  “The truth is that I share your mistrust of the organization I work for,” Asanti said.

  “Then why do you work there?” he asked.

  “Are you saying you love the university you work for? Academia in general? How has your department been treating you the past few years?”

  “Point taken. But there is a difference between being fed up with bureaucracy and being opposed to the mission.”

  “You’re right,” she said. She lowered her voice. “You told me yesterday that you wanted to believe I was serious about the confidentiality agreements we signed. Before I tell you what I am going to tell you, I need you to be serious about that agreement as well.”

  “I am serious,” Izquierdo said. “You have my word.” Something about the way he said it made her believe him.

  “All right,” she said. “The truth is that my organization is in a moment of … redefinition. Things have happened, within the Society and to it, that have made it possible to change its mandate a little. To change its relationship to magic. We have the chance, right now, to change the way the Society works.”

  Izquierdo nodded. “This is good news for you?”

  “Yes,” Asanti said. She surprised herself a little by how much she meant that. “I have always been fascinated by magic.”

  “Yet you agreed to work for an organization with the sole mission of locking it away.”

  “That was never why I took the job. It was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. I think if it were offered to you, you wouldn’t be able to pass it up, either.”

  “That’s probably true,” Izquierdo said wryly.

  “It has been frustrating, at times,” Asanti said. “In the Society’s defense, I have seen things, and my friends have seen things, that have made me understand how dangerous magic can be.”

  “But that can be an argument for learning to control magic, can it not?”

  “Yes,” Asanti said.

  “And what are these things you have seen?”

  Asanti looked at Izquierdo for a second.

  “Demons,” she said. “There’s no better word for it.”

  “With your own eyes?”

  “Yes.”

  “In the Vatican?” Izquierdo said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Izquierdo nodded. “We’ve heard rumors.”

  “I don’t know what you’ve heard, and—please forgive me—I can’t tell you much more. But yes. There were demons in the Vatican. There was havoc there. We are still recovering. It has made us think hard about the way we do our work. And it has brought me here, and to you.”

  “What do you want to ask me?”

  “You know that there was once a part of our Society that did research magic, and that this is no longer the case,” Asanti said.

  “Yes,” Izquierdo said.

  “And you know that, after they were forced out, they don’t appear at all in the written record.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know where they are?”

  “No,” Izquierdo said. “But I think I know where they were. There is a record—or the closest thing any of us has to a record of magical activity—of a hiking party being caught in a snowstorm in the Tatra Mountains in Poland in the mid-1800s. According to the hikers’ journals, they saw the lights of a village in the valley below that wasn’t on their map. Upon entering the village, they were not so much welcomed as detained. The village, they said, was tiny, and everyone there seemed to be about the same age. There were no children, no old people. The hikers didn’t understand a word anyone in the village said, but there appeared to be a meeting of some kind in which the villagers decided what to do with the hikers. In the end, they were given lodging in various houses in the village and they all fell asleep. In the morning, when they woke up, they were lying in a grove in the forest, not far from one another. The weather was clear. The village was gone. But each of the hikers awoke wrapped in thick furs that had kept them from freezing to death—furs that they knew they had not brought with them.”

  “Let me guess,” Asanti said. “No one believed their story.”

  “You have heard this kind of thing before,” Izquierdo said. “Yet the hikers kept the furs for the rest of their lives as proof of what had happened, and they swore to their dying days that the village was real.”

  “Even though no one ever found the village again.”

  “Exactly.”

  “When did you say this was?”

  “Mid-1800s.”

  “I knew it was too good to be true,” Asanti said. “The Vatican’s magic research ended almost a century before that.”

  “Disciples? Descendants?” Izquierdo suggested.

  “Wouldn’t there be more than one dubious story about them if there were a continuous line of them?”

  “Which is exactly what I was thinking when I first came across the story. If what the hikers said is true—”

  “And not a hallucination brought on by hypothermia,” Asanti said.

  “That they all had the same hallucination makes that hypothesis seem less likely to me,” Izquierdo said.

  “Maybe they just wanted to make up a story to get attention after surviving a winter storm.”

  “Maybe. But why would they do that?”

  “Why do people do anything? Why are we here at a conference discussing magic?”

  “Point taken,” Izquierdo said. “But if you approach the story with an open mind—if you assume the hikers’ tale is true—it’s unexplainable within normal parameters. Which means the only explanation would be magical.”

  “You’re making a huge assumption,” Asanti said.

  “We’re not here to prove anything,” Izquierdo said. “We’re just talking over bad coffee. Say the people who save the hikers in the nineteenth century are connected to the people who were forced out of the Church. How could this be?”

  “Maybe they’ve become immortal,” Asanti said.

  “I thought of that, too. Have you ever encountered someone who has figured out how to live forever?”

  Asanti thought of Grace. “No,” she said. “Not really. Not that long.”

  “If not immortality, then what?” Izquierdo said.

  “I have no idea,” Asanti said.

  Izquierdo’s face, which had been animated, fell.

  “And here I was hoping you would have an answer to that.”

  “I don’t,” Asanti said. “How long have you been working on this?”

  “Years,” Izquierdo answered, and laughed. At himself, it seemed to Asanti, for how ludicrous it all must have seemed.

  Which is when both of them heard the screams from the lobby. A man ran by the entrance to the café, his hands flailing in the air as if he was on fire, though there were no flames. Asanti got up and ran to the man just in time to see him collapse in front of the sliding doors leading outside. The doors opened. The man writhed on the ground, moaning. He seemed uninjured at first, but when Asanti got closer, she saw something—a horde of tiny somethings—crawling on him and burrowing into his skin. She got even closer and recognized them at once. They were tiny pieces of rubber, from an eraser. The man fainted, and the pieces dropped off him.

  Later he would explain that he had been sitting in a lecture, and had written something down in his notes that he realized was wrong. He erased it. The writing had reappeared. He erased it again. The writing came back again, in even bolder letters. When the man tried to erase it again, the eraser itself exploded, into far more pieces than was physically possible. They covered him from head to toe, and started digging. Before he ran out of the room in a panic, he managed to catch a last glimpse of the writing he’d been trying to erase. It was filling up with symbols he couldn’t read, as though written in black ink by an invisible hand.

  • • •

  A projector in one of the conference rooms had turned to liquid and run onto the floor. People had stopped using the elevators; the doors seemed to be acting a little too much like jaws, and now th
at they weren’t taking on any passengers, they just sat in the lobby, growling, like they were hungry. Nobody was going anywhere near the swimming pool.

  In the lobby, a few people were checking out early, though not as many as Liam would have thought. Behind the folding tables that the conference had set up, Kapos was alternating between answering his constantly ringing phone and fielding questions from people who kept approaching him. He looked exhausted, but not surprised when he saw Liam coming. He didn’t even try to hide his exasperation.

  “You are here to shut us down?” Kapos said.

  “I’m here because I want to know what’s going on,” Liam said.

  “You have eyes and ears. Ask around.”

  “I’m asking you. How many people have gone to hospital?”

  “I don’t have to answer that question. In fact, answering that question would be a breach of privacy.”

  “I’m not asking who,” Liam said. “I’m asking how many.”

  “There is no need for me to answer.” Kapos raised his voice a notch. “I feel this shouldn’t be necessary, and yet I am compelled to remind you of the agreements you signed upon entering this conference. Together the waiver and the confidentiality agreement can be interpreted as adding up to a rather significant and voluntary forfeiture of certain privileges you may feel free to exercise elsewhere.”

  “Kapos,” Liam said. “That’s your name, right?”

  “You have a good memory.”

  “Yes, I do. I’m not the smartest person I know but I’m not an idiot, either. You’re not making sense. We haven’t waived our right to live.”

  “No one, I repeat, no one,” Kapos said, “has died at this conference, and suggesting as much can be construed as a form of slander, or at least defamation of character.”

  Liam shook his head. “This is useless. We’ve called in the rest of our team.”

  “I’m afraid I won’t be able to let them enter the conference, as they didn’t register properly.”

  “How do I get it through your bureaucratic head that I don’t care?” Liam said.

  Kapos sputtered for a moment, then regained his composure.

  “I should tell you that in the lengthy conversations we had about whether to allow you to attend the conference, this is exactly the sort of thing we worried would happen. That you would take no more than a cursory glance at the conference and the way it is conducted and decide that it was all somehow inappropriate, or perhaps even unethical or immoral. I am ashamed to say that, at the time, I was your strongest ally, and defended your attending.”

  “You sure didn’t act like it when we arrived,” Liam said.

  “I had my regrets. I regret it even more now. You should not have come.”

  “Wait a minute,” Liam said. “Are you saying this is normal? Does this happen every year?”

  Kapos took a deep breath. As he exhaled, he seemed calmer, even aloof.

  “I don’t have to answer any of your questions,” he said. “If you would like to make a formal complaint, you can fill out this comment card.”

  “You can’t be serious,” Liam said.

  Kapos just stood there, the comment card in his hand. His expression didn’t change, but Liam noticed that something in his eyes did. He didn’t look exhausted anymore. He looked terrified.

  I’ve been going about this all wrong, Liam thought. He took the card from Kapos and put it back on the table.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve been rude. I’m not going to lodge a complaint. I’m not here to shut this place down. But what if I told you that my teammates and I might be able to make your problems go away?”

  Kapos didn’t blink. “Do you think you could do that?”

  “We might,” Liam said. “We could certainly try. But you’d have to tell us what’s going on first.”

  Kapos seemed to think about it for several seconds. Liam sensed he was making a big decision. He nodded.

  “All right,” he said finally. He leaned in close to whisper in Liam’s ear. “Meet me in an hour in room 237. Bring your people. But do not arrive together. Let no one know where you’re going and make sure no one sees you. Knock twice. I can’t guarantee that we’ll be there.”

  “I understand,” Liam said.

  “Good,” Kapos said. “One hour.”

  • • •

  Asanti was the last to arrive. She was alone in the hall except for one other person, a woman about her age who seemed somehow to be entirely gray: a gray suit, light gray hair, even gray skin and eyes. They made eye contact as strangers do. Asanti gave her a polite nod, and knocked twice on the door of room 237.

  Kapos answered the door. Liam and Frances were sitting in metal folding chairs. Kapos took a seat in a curved wooden chair with chip marks on the arms. Yolanda, the other conference organizer, was sitting on one of the beds. Asanti sat on the other bed.

  “Thank you all for coming,” Kapos said, “and for being open to working out an arrangement between your organization and ours.” To Asanti, it seemed he was following a mental agenda; if he hadn’t had time to type one out, he had at least done so in his head. “I suppose I will begin by explaining a few things. When the conference began twelve years ago, we were very small, and while many of us were quite knowledgeable about magic, we were less versed in actually using it. In our third year, when the conference was held in Norway, we discovered that this made us vulnerable to an attack by … I suppose, given the part of the world we were in, you would call them trolls. No one was permanently injured but, perhaps needless to say, there was some significant property damage. We lost our deposit with the hotel and were not invited back. What prevented the troll attack from becoming a disaster, not to mention a public relations nightmare, was the intervention of a few of our conference participants, who themselves turned out not to be altogether human. Rather, they were … gremlins, I suppose. They revealed their true forms in a rather spectacular display in the hotel’s lobby, and drove the trolls off, by virtue of being smarter and crueler. In need of security and having no real alternative, we struck a deal with them to be our security for conferences going forward. In exchange, we waived the conference fee and provided airfare.”

  “Classy,” Liam said.

  Kapos nodded. “The next year, and to some extent the year after that, were our best years. The gremlins were able to cast some sort of spell of protection over the conference—I do not fully understand this, but I’m told this is why you were never able to detect the magic we were conducting here—and they prevented the magic from getting out of hand when our participants’ demonstrations went awry. Our conference in Calgary was our crowning success to date.” Asanti wasn’t sure, but she thought she caught a tear in Kapos’s eye.

  He cleared his throat.

  “Over time, however—and perhaps this should come as no surprise to students of political science—the gremlins, having grown used to their position of authority, have begun to abuse it.”

  “Maybe you’re not paying them enough,” Liam said.

  “We are not paying them at all,” Kapos said, “apart from waiving fees and covering airfare.”

  “That’s my point.”

  “Though if we paid them, it might only make it worse.”

  “Gentlemen,” Asanti said, “can we save the theorizing for later?”

  “Thank you,” Kapos said. “The point is that, in the past few years, the gremlins have come to think of the conference as their domain. Harassment of participants ticks upward each year, as does destruction of property—enough that we have been unable to return to the hotels we book at. They will not have us back.”

  “You move each year because you have to?” Asanti said.

  “That’s right,” Kapos said.

  “I thought it was for convenience.”

  Kapos sighed. “I wish it was. Already this year, this resort is threatening us with the same thing.”

  “Where will you go after this?”

  “The search for hotels h
as become tiresome. If the hotels ever start communicating with each other about their experiences with us, we may no longer be able to continue the conference.” Kapos’s tone of voice became very complicated when he said this; Asanti wasn’t sure in that moment if Kapos would be devastated or relieved to see it all end.

  “So what you need,” Liam said, “is a way to be able to bargain with your security. To meet them as equals instead of being held hostage by them.”

  “That would help, yes,” Kapos said.

  “How many of them are there?” Asanti asked.

  Kapos and Yolanda exchanged glances.

  “Go on,” Yolanda said.

  Kapos took a breath. “Six, naturally,” he said. “They are shapeshifters. In their true form, they have no eyes and they run like dogs. Or like a dog might if it was in a space station. I don’t know how they do it. When they are in human form, they are pale. Like the ash in an ashtray. And they have telekinesis. But they are physically weaker in human form.”

  Liam turned to Asanti. “What do you think?”

  “I think we can help you,” Asanti said to Kapos. “But you have to let the rest of our team in.”

  Kapos looked at Yolanda. She nodded.

  “All right. I hope you are as good as your word. We should disperse soon before they notice we’ve all been gone.”

  “They do that much surveillance?” Asanti said.

  “It’s best to assume they do. We cannot be seen leaving this room at the same time.”

  “Do you mind if we leave first? We need to meet our colleagues,” Asanti said.

  “Of course,” Kapos said. He motioned toward the door. Liam got up and left. An awkward couple minutes of silence passed. Frances left. Asanti smiled at Kapos, opened the door, and headed down the hall. There was the same gray woman, sitting on a bench next to the elevator Asanti knew everyone had stopped using. They looked at each other, no longer entirely as strangers. The gray woman recognized Asanti, just as Asanti had recognized her. Asanti kept walking, made sure no one was following her, then waited until she was back in her room to take out her cell phone. She called Liam.

  “Get Frances,” Asanti said. “The gremlins know. And I don’t think they’re going to be happy.”