Bookburners The Complete Season Two

by Max Gladstone

  Add the not-so-subtle tail, and she felt right at home.

  “They picked us up at the hotel, do you think?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Or followed us from the airport?”

  She didn’t repeat herself.

  “Could be thugs—I look like a tourist.”

  He didn’t, quite. Liam, as usual, looked a little too dangerous, and a little too sure of himself, to play the clueless outsider. No sense telling him—he’d take the former as a compliment, try to overcorrect for the latter, and only make himself more noticeable as a result. Sometimes—often—Grace really wished more of the team had formal espionage experience. “Our tail is a professional.” On the subway, their tail had passed as a bored commuter; Grace had noticed the slender woman with the round unremarkable face and the chin-length bob when she followed them into the City God Temple. Certainly, locals went to the Temple, or at least they had back in the old days, but the woman with the bob had paid for a ticket, then left as soon as Grace and Liam did, and she’d followed them ever since.

  Grace shouldered into her coat and led Liam past a scummy green reflecting pool that reflected only the bridge above it. “The Bizarre must be around here somewhere.” But Liam wasn’t at her shoulder anymore—he’d slowed to ogle a, God, a straight-sword on display in a tourist shop. She hooked his elbow with hers and tugged him along. He flailed, exaggerating, and almost toppled into an old woman in a fake fur coat. The woman responded with a vicious glare that after all this time abroad Grace could still read with perfect clarity: Screw this idiot if you must, but manage him. As if she’d ever. That sort of mistake was more Sal’s purview. “Keep close. And keep moving. Once we find the Bizarre, we can try to lose them.”

  “It’s magic,” Liam said. “Maybe it won’t open while we’re being followed. Hell, maybe our tail is from the Bizarre. Maybe the place can read our thoughts. Maybe it’s listening to us right now.”

  “You’re paranoid.”

  “In our line of work, that makes me a realist.”

  They skirted the edge of a street performer crowd; Grace led Liam into a shop that sold overpriced middling-quality porcelain, and out another door, circling back on their path. “When I was last here, the magical community congregated around the City God Temple at Spring Festival once a decade. They rented market stalls and plied their wares in disguise—but this was a real market, then.” She spotted the woman with the bob out of the corner of her eye, searching the crowd; the woman would catch on to Grace’s trick soon, but the confusion would give Grace time to spot any other tails. She needed a vantage point—the footbridge over the reflecting pool would do. “Can you imagine someone like the Maitresse doing business here?”

  “If she liked bubble tea, maybe.”

  Grace didn’t dignify that with a response. The sky flashed blue in the reflecting pool; she looked away.

  “The Maitresse wouldn’t have sent us on a false lead,” Liam said.

  “Are we talking about the same Maitresse? Ancient, mysterious, utterly self-interested?” Grace stopped. “What did she say about the Bizarre, again?”

  “She said it was ‘right where you left it, on the flip side.’”

  “‘On the flip side.’ Those words.”

  Liam leaned against the bridge railing. “Like you said: she’s ancient, mysterious, and utterly self-interested. I don’t think it’s fair to judge her for not being hip to current slang.”

  “Hush.” He shut up. Good boy. Grace didn’t burn. She didn’t need to move faster, just to think in four directions at once. First: A few figures in the crowd moved out of step with the rest, too slow or too fast, scanning for a quarry, settling on her. More surveillance. Second: What would she, Grace, do if she were enormously skilled in magic, and of a mind to hold a clandestine market in a high-profile tourist stop? Third: On this gray afternoon, how had the scummy reflecting pool produced that sharp blue flash? Fourth: She hoped the auntie in the fake fur coat would be watching this next bit. “You know what we’re looking for.”

  “The circlet.” He tapped his jacket pocket. “I have the description, the Vatican dispensation, and everything.”

  “Good. Start shopping. I’ll lose our tails. Meet me back at the hotel.”

  His brow furrowed. “What are you talking about, Grace? I don’t—”

  She pushed Liam off the bridge, and through the reflecting pool.

  2.

  Well, Liam thought before he hit the water, she’s finally cracked.

  Then he burst through into a bright, cold day, and stared up into a sky wreathed with dragons.

  He blinked the sun out of his eyes, but the dragons remained. Different dragons from your Saint-George-and-the- varietal: These lacked wings, but they still flew. Thick manes twisted about serene, fierce faces. Claws folded beside snaky bodies that knotted and curled about one another in the sky—vast and ancient. Fighting, he thought at first, but those teeth didn’t tear, those claws did not rend. Playing. The brilliance he’d taken for sunlight in fact issued from a shimmering pearlescent sphere that danced just out of the dragons’ reach: Whenever one dragon threatened to catch the pearl in its jaws, another would bat it out of the way with a twist of tail.

  Dragons. Playing football.

  Maybe Grace wasn’t the one who’d cracked.

  No, they both had. She cracked when she pushed him off the bloody bridge. And then he cracked after, when he hit the concrete underwater. Except he didn’t remember hitting anything—he just slipped through.

  The ground rippled under him. He looked down. It wasn’t ground at all.

  He lay ringed by lily pads on a clear pond. Below, underwater, he saw the gray Shanghai sky, and people staring down into the reflecting pool. Of course. The flip side. He didn’t see Grace. She must have left already. Start shopping, she’d said. Meet me back at the hotel.

  Might as well get to it. He sat up.

  The Bizarre lay around him, Technicolor-bright.

  He scrambled to his feet. Ripples spread from his sneakers.

  Three dead men in green silk robes hopped past, their arms extended straight out from their shoulders, bearing stacks of yellowed scrolls. A man wearing a red hat and a three-piece suit glanced toward Liam and away—he looked perfectly normal in every respect save for the old cut of his clothes, and the snake’s fangs that showed when he smiled. A silk-robed woman with a tiger’s head haggled with a four-armed man for skewers of spiced grilled lamb. Another woman, eight feet tall and draped in spider silk, swept past; twelve identical girls carried her train. In a rock garden nearby, a monk arm-wrestled a man made out of stone. Wares sprawled in front of every storefront—cups and herbs and unguents, spices and oils, playing cards, knives and mortars and pestles. Shopkeepers touted their stock in a dozen languages, few of which Liam recognized, let alone spoke.

  Shopping. Right.

  He stumbled off the water and onto the stone courtyard. “Excuse me?” The giantess in gray silk brushed past. “I’m looking to buy some antiques.” The tigress either didn’t hear him, or was too busy holding the recalcitrant grill man upside down and shaking him. “I, uh. Hello?” Neither the monk nor his adversary seemed to notice.

  “Yo,” someone said.

  Liam whirled, and found himself confronted by a hedgehog. “Er.”

  “You looking to buy, mate?” The hedgehog raised itself on its hind legs, and crossed arms Liam was certain shouldn’t bend that way. “You’ve come to the right place.”

  • • •

  When Liam fell through the water, Grace burned. Her pursuers would waste a few seconds watching the reflecting pool for the fallen Irishman. She could use that time.

  A candle flame flared in a convent apartment on the other side of the world. Droplets of precious wax laid trails down the candle’s sides and fell, cooling, to the table. Each time she moved this fast, Grace used a little more of her life. She burned an hour in a minute, and told herself it would have been a bad hour anyway, ti
me wasted in transit, fingers trailing through tall grass, inconsequential breaths. (She wouldn’t grow old, bonded to the candle—one more privilege of the curse—so she couldn’t tell herself any of the comfortable lies she’d heard Sal make about saving herself a year in a nursing home.) The world ran slow, sound and light went weird. By the time her pursuers looked back toward the bridge, she was already gone. A little burst of speed was all she needed to jump ahead of the surveillance team, sliding past honey-slow humans down the alley toward the street acrobats.

  Grace found the woman with the bob emerging from the door to the porcelain shop. She dropped down to normal time—the world took a hit of helium, footsteps sped, music sharpened—and waited in a narrow alley between two stores until the woman passed her by. Then Grace grabbed her shoulder and said, in Mandarin, “Excuse me.”

  The woman tensed like a rabbit in a trap—but only for a second. She had bad instincts, but good training. She twisted under Grace’s hand, caught her wrist, and would have thrown her against the wall had Grace not circle-stepped around, grabbed her wrist in turn, and tossed her against the wall, whereupon she bounced back, and—

  Well.

  Three seconds later, the fight was over. “I just wanted to talk,” Grace said. “But I will break your arm if you try that again.” The woman writhed beneath her knee. “What’s your name?” She tried to press herself up one-handed against Grace’s weight, but Grace twisted the woman’s arm, and she went limp. “I really would rather talk.”

  The woman wheezed something into the pavement.

  “Sorry,” Grace said, and shifted her weight.

  “This is our territory. You’re not supposed to be here, Bookburner.”

  Grace didn’t recognize the term at first. She’d never heard it in Chinese before. “Of course,” she said. “But as long as I am, maybe we can help each other.”

  • • •

  “No worries,” said the hedgehog, who’d told Liam several times to call him Sam, after their third vendor shrugged at Liam’s description of the circlet. “Old Sam still has one more trick up his sleeve.” He laughed, and pointed to his bare arms. “If you know what I mean. You get what you pay for in this place.”

  “I still don’t get why you speak English,” Liam said.

  “Come on, mate. Everyone speaks English these days.”

  The hedgehog darted underneath a palanquin carried by jumping corpse things, and scuttled through the crowd on all fours. Liam shouldered after. “But you can’t go around, um, the outside world, looking like that.”

  “Looking like—ha! No, certainly not, certainly not. But the market isn’t an everyday sort of thing, if you follow. Especially not recently. Some of us live deep in the Far-Out, some of us live here full time, some of us—me, for example—hide in skin and wait to come back. Nine years and eleven months per decade, I look no weirder than anyone else you’d meet on Nanjing Lu. And here we go.”

  The pavilion before which Sam stood had no wares on display, and no windows either. It had one door, closed.

  “Doesn’t look open.”

  “Knock,” Sam said. “The Old Lady doesn’t advertise, but she has the best wares in the game. She’s been around so long nobody knows her name, or where she came from. This circlet you’re here for is an old piece. She’ll know where it is, or how to get it.”

  “Why didn’t we go there first?”

  “She’s not exactly what you would call social.”

  Liam hesitated, his fist in front of the door. Knocking seemed too normal—better than anything else in this goddamn shadowland. You’re fine, he told himself. You’re not possessed. The sooner you get over your hang-ups, the sooner you’ll be back in a world that makes sense.

  He knocked.

  The door opened on darkness.

  Fair enough.

  Then a lasso of hair caught him around the waist and dragged him into the shop.

  • • •

  The woman rested against the alley wall, and glared up at Grace. “You can call me Wang Jianguo,” she said. “I’m with the Arcane Security Bureau.”

  Grace wondered whether Wang’s name was a pseudonym, or a sign of parental patriotism. No sense asking. “Grace,” she said.

  Wang Jianguo didn’t respond.

  Grace crouched in front of her. “We don’t have to be enemies. You’re watching the Bizarre—from the outside. I bet that’s because they don’t let you in these days. Do I have that right?”

  “We do what we can,” Wang Jianguo said. “There have been disagreements.”

  “But my friend made it through.”

  “They know he’s not one of us.”

  “And you’re watching, because it’s your duty. You want to keep your people safe. You want information.” Wang bared her teeth, but said nothing. “We can work together.”

  Wang watched her for a moment that was too long to be calculated. “What do you want?”

  “Safe passage out of the country,” Grace said. The next part took effort: “And information.”

  “I can’t help you.”

  An answer that fast meant she could. Grace had practiced the next part in a mirror; she’d recorded herself saying the words, noted and scrubbed the longing from her voice. “I have a list of names. People who worked in government, in a department with your remit, before ’49. Tell me what happened to them, and I’ll tell you what’s going on inside the Bizarre.”

  She heard running feet. A silhouette rounded the corner: a bulky man in a down jacket. Grace prepared to burn, but before he could move, Wang Jianguo raised her hand. He halted. Excellent. Wang Jianguo had pull. Maybe it would be enough.

  Wang Jianguo’s round, full lips condensed into a red dot. Her eyes held still.

  She extended her a hand, palm up.

  Grace produced a folded piece of paper from her vest pocket: the names. Men and women she’d worked beside in ’28—friends, mostly, some enemies, all dead by now of natural causes, if they hadn’t been sent against the wall in some purge or other. But knowing mattered. She’d fought with them. Bled with them. Slept with them. Loved them, which wasn’t always the same thing. Her hand did not tremble. She gave Wang the paper.

  Wang Jianguo closed her fingers around Grace’s past.

  “Thank you,” Grace said, and was gone.

  • • •

  The door slammed shut behind Liam, and the hair unwound from his waist. The shop walls crowded him with jars of herbs and dangling chains. Silver shears of many shapes and sizes hung in leather sheaths upon the wall. Behind them, the walls were black matte. No, not matte—shiny, and moving. Hair.

  A woman sat behind a narrow wooden desk. She had a stretched face and broad, sharp cheekbones, and her eyes were black from eyelid to eyelid. Hers was the hair that covered the walls.

  Well, fine. Every once in a while, as a Bookburner—hell, more than once in a while—you had to face something that made your heart race and your guts twinge and all the little sensible voices in the back of your head go fuck fuck fuck, and smile, and say, “Hi.”

  So he did.

  The woman, the Old Lady, inclined her head slightly. The veins webbed beneath her skin weren’t blood-blue. Silver. Mercury?

  “Ah. I’m looking to buy a circlet. It would be silvery, you know, about yea big, Latin around the inside. Came to the country with a Jesuit, fellow by the name of Matteo Ricci, a few centuries back.” She did not seem impressed by his description. Fair enough. Maybe there were lots of circlets around. “If you put it on, you can see things happening. I mean, far away-like. And see through illusions. And things.”

  The Old Lady retreated into the curtain of her hair, as smoothly as if she’d run on rails. Liam stared into the purpling black after her, wondering if he should wait or leave.

  Then a fingernail touched the back of his neck.

  He whirled. The Old Lady stood between him and the door, well out of arm’s reach. Unless she had very long arms.

  Be professional. Liam w
ished Father Menchú could be here to see just how goddamn professional he was being.

  The Old Lady raised one hand, and the curtain of hair to her right parted. The wall behind the hair was covered with drawers of different shapes and sizes. One rolled out. Within, on a red velvet pillow, lay the Ricci Circlet.

  Nothing was certain in this life, and Liam knew better than to jump to conclusions. But it looked a damn lot like the Ricci Circlet in the illustrations Asanti had showed him, at least. Same Latin and everything.

  “Can I—” He reached for it.

  The Old Lady shook her head, and he stopped. She rubbed her fingers together. Payment.

  “I don’t… that is…” What would the Father say, here? “What would you like? I’m, er, the people who sent me here can trade—silver, or information, or magic.” She blinked, and Liam realized she hadn’t, before. “Anything, really.” Hey, this negotiation thing wasn’t so hard. “If you’ll tell me what interests you, I’m sure we can work out an arrangement with the Vatican while—”

  Her black eyes went white.

  Liam tried to run, or tackle her, or do anything that involved heading doorward, but ropes of hair snared his arms and legs; a noose tightened around his neck. He growled and pulled away, but the hair felt strong as steel. He might as well have been caught in a piano-wire net. “Fuck!”

  Professional.

  A strand of the Old Lady’s hair sliced open his shirt. The silver cross glistened against his skin.