Bookburners The Complete Season Two

by Max Gladstone

  “My money’s on Bowman Brown Law,” said Liam. “I mean, he saw a fire had started but ran back to his coat for something precious in his pocket? Suspicious, right? Maybe he had an artifact that had been stolen or tampered with.”

  “Sure,” said Sal, “but what about the weird guy wandering around the reading room who no one knew? The man in the sensible suit? Maybe the Germans had a line on some magic and were going to use that to burn down Parliament?”

  “Absolutely not,” said Asanti. “First, governments don’t deal with magic, and the Vatican still had jurisdiction over Germany’s magic books during the war. Second, why summon a fire demon when you could just as easily strike a match in a strategically placed wastebasket?” She frowned. “Unless, if someone were already possessed, perhaps …”

  “Which could’ve been anyone.” Sal waved a hand. “This is all speculative until we know what we’re dealing with. How do we go from someone opening a book and getting possessed to … whatever we saw last night? Maybe we should be looking into hummingbirds instead?”

  “Or anniversaries,” said Asanti, thoughtfully. “What processes take a hundred years?”

  Liam’s phone buzzed. “Grace is on her way,” he said.

  Sal nodded. “So … should we maybe think about how we’re going to deal with this thing tonight? What’s the protocol if there’s no book or artifact to collect?”

  Asanti rubbed her neck. “Usually, if that is the case, Team One is already on it. This is a very odd situation. I’d almost say the best thing to do is just continue to observe.”

  “Seriously?” Liam frowned. “Just observe a demon burning a library to the ground?”

  “But it hasn’t,” said Sal. “Whatever damage it’s doing, it’s also undoing. And it’s got to be magical if it’s not turning up on cameras, right? If it hadn’t been for the motion detectors we wouldn’t even have been here to see it.”

  Liam scratched his chin. “If it’s magical—maybe we should be using silver on it.”

  Sal frowned. “Did you smuggle any silver bullets through customs?”

  “No,” said Liam. “But I did bring the shroud for keeping books shut. Maybe we can use that to trap it.”

  Sal and Asanti looked at each other, then at him. “That’s—a really good idea,” said Sal.

  Liam glanced up at the ceiling. “We could rig it over one of the lights above the statue, maybe—if it’s a ghost thing it should appear in the same place, right?”

  “It’s worth a shot,” said Asanti. “Let’s do it.”

  • • •

  They hid themselves this time, each in their own nook at the library’s edge, the better to surround the room’s center, and each clutching a flashlight in case the lights went out again. They’d unseamed the bag into a makeshift net, weighted its corners with office supplies, and hoisted it up around a light fixture in a system that would have done Acme Industries proud. Grace was closest, clutching the line keeping the net up and ready to release it at the first glimpse of flame.

  “Two minutes,” said Liam, quietly, watching the space above the statue. “Assuming it’s a punctual sort of demon ghost, anyway—”

  The room went dark.

  “Demon ghost after my own heart,” muttered Grace. She was crouched near one of the alcoves radiating out of the room, and kept her eyes trained on the patch of darkness above the statue she could no longer see, waiting for the column of fire to appear.

  She felt the heat at her back in the same instant she heard Sal shout, “Grace! Behind you!”

  She turned to see the column forming just as before—except it was a foot away from her, half again as tall as the previous night, and roughly thirty feet from where they’d placed the net.

  “Well, shit,” she said, and box-jumped backward onto a desk, still gripping the rope. “Can either of you get it in position?”

  Features were forming inside the column, just like the night before—but they were different features, Grace realized. The enormous horns were curved like a ram’s instead of a bull’s; the muscled body taking shape in the flame was curved too, and Grace blinked to see the outline of breasts developing. The wings, she noted with some annoyance, were more or less the same, if twice as wide; she didn’t think she could stop it from taking off again.

  So she did what she was best at; she waited until the flame had a face, then leapt into the air and kicked it.

  The demon looked more offended than hurt; the flames in its eyes flared, but before it could do more than roar, Sal and Liam darted out of their hiding places and toward the center of the room, frantically waving their arms at it. “Hey, ugly!” shouted Sal, rearing back and throwing her flashlight at it. It bounced harmlessly off one of the horns, but earned her the demon’s attention; nostrils flaring, it lowered its head and charged at her—but stopped, not three feet away from her, as if distracted by something.

  Sal looked up and saw two things dimly by demon-light: one, that the hummingbird was hovering at the level of the demon’s eyes—and two, that she was directly under the net of silver mesh.

  “Grace, now!” she shouted, then dove out from beneath it.

  Grace let go of the rope; the net fell; it passed through the demon like water through a sieve, but dropped the hummingbird from the air like a stone.

  The lights came back on. The demon hovered still in the air for a moment, then shook its head as if to clear it; it looked up, growled low in the furnace of its throat, then beat its wings twice and rocketed through the library’s cupola in a symphony of smashed glass and timbers.

  Grace stared after it; Liam and Sal stared at each other; Asanti hurried toward the net.

  Pinned beneath it, as if by an enormous weight, was Aisha.

  “You idiots,” she screamed. “I had this! Fucking bookburning scum! Get this off me!”

  “You’re, ah—” said Asanti, while Liam looked away, “naked—”

  Sal found herself mentally building the trusses necessary to bridge the canyon between the sweet, even-tempered guide she’d met two days ago and the scathingly furious woman immobilized beneath the net.

  “Listen,” said Aisha, biting each syllable off, “if you don’t take this mess of silver off me now I won’t be able to chase down the ifrit you just unleashed on my fucking city. Take. It. Off.”

  Sal, Grace, and Asanti looked at each other, stunned. Then Asanti stepped forward and lifted the net; almost instantly, Aisha’s limbs seemed to shimmer, melt, and fold into feathers, and a huge black bird flew up to and through the broken window.

  “I’m going after them,” said Grace.

  “We’ll come too—”

  “You won’t be able to keep up.” Then Grace was a blur, leaping and scaling shelves and walls to the wreck of window and climbing out.

  The demon wasn’t hard to find; Grace could see an orange blur about a mile south, toward Confederation Park. She closed the distance in three minutes. The ifrit blazed in a garden of ice sculptures, lighting up an orchestra of crystalline instruments and dancing animals while lobbing balls of flame at a crow diving fiercely toward it, darting back, croaking furiously the while.

  It hadn’t yet hit the crow—but it had hit a number of the sculptures. Grace narrowed her eyes.

  “Oh, hell no.”

  She crouched down. With her good hand she packed a snowball against her leg, then reared back and threw it at the demon’s head.

  It roared and turned to face her—which was just enough time for the crow to fly down in front of it, meet its eyes, and, somehow, still it. Then Grace watched as the demon’s shape wavered, paled, and did violence to the laws of thermodynamics: The sculptures reformed pristinely around her as the demon shrank back into a column and vanished.

  The crow flapped down to Grace’s shoulder.

  “We need to talk,” it said.

  4.

  Grace’s text had summoned them to the Elgin Street Diner, an all-night place that was empty except for a bored-looking staff m
ember playing games on his phone. Sal, Liam, Grace, and Asanti crowded the corner farthest from the door; across a table from them sat Aisha, now in jeans and a bright red T-shirt with an oversized yellow star in the middle of it, one hand wrapped around a mug of coffee the size of her face, while the other hand methodically depleted the contents of a bowl of raw sugar cubes, bypassing the mug in favor of delivering them straight to her mouth.

  She looked at them, level and cool and a little curious as she crunched the cubes.

  “Well,” she said, licking her lips, “I guess it’s nice to see the Bookburners have diversified their hiring practices in the last hundred years.”

  Sal didn’t rise to the bait. “Were you around then?”

  “No.” Aisha sipped her coffee. “My great-grandmother was. Bookburners fucked up her job then too.”

  “And what is that job?” asked Asanti, with a frank, open curiosity that made a line in Liam’s jaw twitch.

  Aisha smirked a little, but her heart didn’t seem to be in it. She tucked a loose lock of her thick hair behind an ear, and looked into her coffee as if to read the answer there.

  “Immigration and citizenship. Or more to the point recently—border security,” she said, and the bitterness of it could’ve been dredged from the bottom of her cup. “The tide is rising, all that—it means migrants. It means refugees. We help … translate people into this plane of existence.”

  “You mean—” Sal started to say before Liam sputtered, “You’re deliberately bringing demons into the world?”

  Aisha looked as if she was about five seconds from transforming into an ice pick and driving herself into Liam’s eye. Grace and Sal both tensed; Asanti reached out a hand, not touching her, but resting it palm down near Aisha’s coffee mug, looking calm and interested.

  “Please,” said Asanti. “Continue.”

  Aisha exhaled. “You know how there’s no such thing as a fish?”

  Everyone, almost in unison, blinked. Aisha continued.

  “It’s one of those colloquial phrases that annoys scientists but makes for a good metaphor. There are loads and loads of sea creatures, but that doesn’t mean they’re closely related to each other, any more than a bat is a bird because it can fly. Go back far enough and we evolved from fish, but we’re not fish. You know?”

  “Sure,” said Sal, frowning a little at the fact that Asanti’s eyes were widening in a comprehension she herself hadn’t yet reached. “So …?”

  “So there’s no such thing as a demon.” She looked straight at Liam. “There are spirit peoples. There are ifrits, there are djinn, there are peri. There are nations and ethnicities and complications. There’s the further fact that these aren’t monolithic groups any more than ‘Muslim’ or ‘queer’ or ‘woman’ is. I mean, fuck, this is so goddamn basic I can’t believe I have to explain it to adults.” Her mug trembled as she raised it to her lips, sipped, shook her head. “There’s as much variation among spirit peoples as there is among humans. But you don’t see them except in terms of their distance from you, from what you understand. Some of your so-called demons get named ‘angels’ if they’re pretty, or if they were nice to you. Your whole way of looking at the world is so small it makes it hard to breathe.”

  As if punctuating her point, she took a long, deep breath. It struck Sal then just how young she was; she really was only on the threshold of twenty, young to be battling monsters—or rescuing them.

  “So,” said Sal, gently, “what’s going on in the library?”

  Aisha sighed, sipped, and continued.

  “A hundred years ago,” she said, quietly, and Sal could hear her calming as she settled into storytelling, “someone stole something from my family. My great-grandmother—her name was Nasiba—worked on the Hill as a cleaning lady. Someone spied on her, most likely—followed her, watched her work a ritual and translate an ifrit into our world, and got ideas. I can imagine why; it was wartime, and it must’ve been tempting to summon an army of fire-creatures to burn the Hun out of the trenches or whatever. But she never learned who. All she knew was that someone wrote down the refrain from her summoning song—only the refrain, without any of the protections, protocols, parameters. Like stealing flame from a hearth and trying to warm yourself by putting it on a pile of newspaper in a well-ventilated room.” She shook her head again, bit her lip.

  “The night of the fire, someone read out the refrain. Nasiba felt it—felt the doors between worlds open—and an ifrit, with no constraints, no training, no preparation, came through, possessed whoever brought it, and went on a rampage. It leapt from person to person. Nasiba chased it—she calmed it, she expelled it from the person it was occupying. She started doing the passes that would limit it. That part—it’s like drawing up a contract.” Aisha put her coffee down to draw the shape of a contract on the tabletop with a fingertip, to talk with her hands. “Some boilerplate—have you ever committed acts of genocide, et cetera—and then the cost of staying is the withdrawal of their damage from the world. Ifrits are self-sustaining fire; their flames don’t burn unless they will them to burn. They can reduce a thing to ash, pull their flame back and undo the damage.”

  Sal startled at that, and looked at Grace; Grace’s look of unflappable scrutiny didn’t change.

  “And if they break the contract?” asked Grace.

  “They vanish back into their own world instantly, and any damage they did goes with them.”

  “Like in the library,” said Asanti, slowly.

  “Like in the library,” said Aisha. “With one exception: They can’t bring people back to life.” Aisha looked down quickly, but not before Sal could see a storm of misery flash over her face. “If they kill someone, there’s no recourse. Whether it’s self-defense, or an accident, or to protect someone else—there’s no way to let an ifrit who’s killed someone stay.”

  Aisha picked up her mug again, turned it round in her hands.

  “So Nasiba had the ifrit right at that point—swallow the damage, sign the contract—when the Bookburners turned up.” Aisha tried and failed to shrug in a way that was more nonchalant than furious. “First they thought my great-grandmother needed rescuing from the demon; then they thought she summoned the demon and had to be stopped. They distracted her long enough that Centre Block started coming down around them, and people … people started dying.” Aisha took another sip of her coffee; Sal thought she could see her blinking back tears. “So now Nasiba could only banish it—but that’s a complicated process without the support of a contract, and that’s without contending with Bookburners in a building that’s literally on fire. So she chased the ifrit into the library; Michael MacCormac shut the door after them and escaped. She engaged the ifrit in a magician’s battle—you know, the thing where you try to out-shape-shift each other in a sort of call and response until one of you yields—until it turned into a pomegranate and burst. It’s a super traditional move.” Aisha said this a bit like an art critic. “The response is to turn into a rooster and peck at all the seeds until you find the one that contains the ifrit’s true essence. But my great-grandmother was out of time. There were Bookburners at the door, she had a family to think about and protect, and the stakes of failure were too high. So she just … she put everything in the library to sleep. For a hundred years. And she fled. Took her family to Toronto, as far from the Catholics as she could get; raised two generations with the knowledge that we had to come back to Ottawa and be here in time for the ifrit to wake up.”

  Sal frowned. “But—there were at least two—”

  Aisha shook her head. “No. Those were only fragments—echoes of the ifrit buried in the pomegranate seeds, trying to become whole again as my great-grandmother’s magic weakens.”

  “But they looked different,” said Liam, frowning. Aisha rolled her eyes.

  “If you were broken into hundreds of pieces, you wouldn’t look much like your current self either. How much have you grown and changed over your lifetime? You might appear as a kid, as a teen,
with different teeth or hair. Ifrits can change shape; they keep the memory of every shape they’ve worn. Some of them remember shapes they haven’t yet worn.” She shrugged. “They’re, you know, magic. I’ve been banishing them every night for the past week.”

  Asanti looked concerned. “But—how many have there been?”

  Aisha chuckled, wearily. “I’ve got ninety-nine problems and ifrits are all of them.” She leaned back in her chair. “They started out smaller, though. It’s why I’ve been able to banish them so easily—their origin isn’t the ifrit’s world, but the ifrit. I banish one, it goes back to the source seed. That’s why they’ve been getting bigger and stronger the closer we’ve come to the anniversary.” She bit her lip. “Now there’s only one left, wrapped in all its power. And I don’t know what to do with it.”

  “Ah,” said Asanti, softly. “You can’t banish it.”

  Liam, Sal, and Grace all looked from Aisha to Asanti and back, in confusion. Sal ventured to ask, “Why? Isn’t that what you’ve been trained to do?”

  Aisha sighed. “You remember the part where banishing an ifrit undoes any damage it’s done?”

  Sal frowned. “Yes …”

  “This ifrit’s fire burned down the 1916 Parliament. The Parliament that’s since been entirely rebuilt.”

  “Oh,” said Sal, blinking.

  “So if you banish it,” said Liam, incredulously, “the old Parliament … comes back?”

  “In exactly the same place,” said Aisha. “Where we currently have a perfectly nice Parliament. Full of, you know. A government. Civil servants. People who’d be obliterated beneath the weight of the old Parliament reappearing. Not a great look.”

  “No kidding,” said Sal, thinking. “So … your options are what exactly? You can’t banish it. You can’t … translate it, as you said. Are there any loopholes to allow it to stay?”

  “I’ve been studying this for years. The only loophole I’ve been able to find is Nasiba’s,” said Aisha, quietly. “But I’m still a novice. I’m not as strong as she was. I can’t work that kind of area-wide magic, even with the tide rising in my favor. It’s a knot I can’t untie.” She leaned forward again, laid her hands flat against the table’s surface, looking miserable. “I have to cut through it. I have to kill it.”