Libriomancer (9781101597552)

by Hines, Jim C.

  “Can you lock it again?”

  Now that I had seen how Gutenberg did it . . . I shook my head. “I’d need more time to study, and even if I did, what’s to stop him from ripping open the rest?” I wiped my hands on my jeans. “But I can use this book to find him.”

  Lena sat down beside me, resting her twin bokken on her thighs. “This is what Nidhi tried to warn you against, isn’t it? What will it do to you?”

  “I have no idea. I’ve never done it before.” I held up Rabid. “Imagine magic as a frozen lake, one which coexists with the world around us. The book is the auger that helps us drill through the surface, and that hole gives definition to the energy beneath.”

  “Magic as ice fishing. That’s different.”

  “Every copy of this book chips away at the same hole, including the one our killer has been working with.”

  “You can spy on him through that hole? Through your copy of the book?”

  “In theory.” It violated half the rules of libriomancy, but there was precedent. “Gutenberg did it once, back in World War II. He used a copy of Mein Kampf to gather intelligence about the Germans. Every copy of the book becomes a kind of magical bug.” As I understood the story, that experience had come dangerously close to killing him. Drowning him, to extend the metaphor. Magical objects dissolved back into energy when returned to their books. What would happen to my mind if I lost my mental grip and slipped beneath the ice?

  The only consolation was that I probably wouldn’t last long enough to know I had failed.

  “I know that look,” Lena said. “What aren’t you telling me? How am I supposed to help if I don’t know—”

  “You can’t help,” I snapped, and instantly regretted it. I opened the book and started reading.

  Lena plucked it out of my hands and read the back. “So what’s the risk? Are you going to infect yourself with this virus? If so, we can find another way. I’m not watching you die.”

  I shook my head. “The danger isn’t physical. Even if I succeed . . . there’s a possibility that something might come back through me.”

  “You’re worried about being possessed, like Gutenberg?”

  I didn’t bother trying to snatch the book away from her. “If I do this, we have a shot at finding him. If I lose myself, you can drag my body back to the vampires. All I know is that if I don’t try, Doctor Shah dies.”

  Lena stiffened. She gripped the book with both hands. For a moment, I thought she might refuse to return it. A part of me hoped she would. But she reached out, offering the book back to me.

  Neither of us spoke. There was no need.

  I blinked, trying to concentrate on the story. The opening was fast-paced, full of danger and tension as emergency room doctors tried to save a patient from a nearby university who had been infected with an early form of the virus. As I read, the pages grew warmer. I imagined the characters’ voices, the shouts as the patient turned violent, trapped in the terror of fever-induced hallucinations. Tears streamed down his face, and he sprayed spittle as he screamed. He struck a nurse and jumped off of the gurney, only to collapse as his legs gave way. From the shadows, a figure in a dark suit calmly documented it all.

  I gradually allowed my fingertips to melt into the page. The pain of Gutenberg’s broken magic wasn’t as sharp this time. So long as I moved slowly, I could keep from crying out. My hand sank to the wrist. At this point, I could have taken anything I wanted from the story: weapons, medicine, infected blood . . . “So far, so good.”

  “What next?” asked Lena.

  It looked exactly like someone had severed my hand and grafted a book onto the stump. I flexed my hand. I could feel my fingers, but what did that really mean? Some Porters argued that your body retained its physical form when you reached into a book; others claimed your flesh and bones ceased to be, and that only the “persistence of belief” in your own body allowed you to maintain and re-create your flesh while performing libriomancy. “Have you ever wondered where the ‘self’ is?”

  The question was rhetorical, but she responded without pause. “Shared between this body and my tree.”

  “Really? Can you feel your tree even when you’re separated from it? Does distance change— Never mind.” I hauled my attention back to the book. “Possession occurs when characters from a book reach into the Porter’s mind. I need to do the opposite, to push my mind, my self into the book.”

  Voices whispered in my ear. I recognized them all. Georgia McCain, the dedicated doctor who worked to track the virus from the university back to its source. Brad Ryder, the agent whose investigation brought him to Georgia’s front door. I felt their fear, their anger, their unspoken attraction, and their desperation to save the world. But those emotions weren’t their own. The characters were nothing but words on a page. Whatever pseudolife I felt had been created by readers and magic.

  My boundaries were weak from the exertions of the past several days, and the longer I maintained my connection to the book, the more those voices would push through the cracks in my mind.

  “Isaac?” Lena touched my shoulder. Her words sounded slurred and distant.

  “I’m all right.” I shoved her hand away, concentrating on those voices, immersing myself in the spell laid out by Shaffer, a spell as magical as anything cast by the sorcerers of old. I could feel the book’s potential power, a tingle that ran just beneath my skin, waiting to be shaped. Wanting to be shaped.

  The voices were louder now: panicked screams and furious arguments. A politician’s cool, calming speech. The grief of a parent mourning a child.

  I couldn’t see Lena or the factory anymore. Images flickered, taunting me from the edge of my awareness. I waited impatiently as they gradually came into focus, if “focus” was the right word for the collage of shifting figures that surrounded me. I stared at one, trying to will it into clarity, but my efforts merely made my head hurt. It was as if someone had taken a thousand photographs of similar-looking women and layered them atop one another, until you lost all but the rough suggestion of a woman in a white lab coat.

  Every one of those layers was a reader’s mental image of Georgia McCain. I was seeing their belief. Excitement surged through me, followed by a single question. Now that I’m here, how do I get out again?

  My body felt numb and heavy. I tried to flex my hands, but there was no way of telling whether I succeeded. I hesitated, but if I tried to escape now, I’d have accomplished nothing. I tried to relax, to calm my thoughts, even as more figures shuffled toward me.

  In the real world, thousands of copies of Rabid were spread across the globe; magically speaking, every one of those copies coexisted here. But only one of those books had been used recently to manipulate magic. I searched for any lingering trace of magic, trying to let the current guide me.

  Pain returned. I welcomed it. This was the first physical sensation I had felt since losing myself in the book. The shattered lock cut deeper this time, and I could see the text more clearly, both the Latin, laid out in neat blocks and rows, and a second spell made up of broken scrawls, all but illegible.

  Both the lock and that second spell had been placed upon the physical copy of the book I was looking for. I clung to them, letting the pain flow through me as I reached out to touch that physical book.

  Darkness. Cold air that smelled like oil and gasoline. The heavy, dead magic of locked books. This wasn’t from my copy of Rabid; I was sensing wherever that other book was being kept.

  My mind leaped at the implications. Could two libriomancers communicate this way? Could messages be passed through matching books? If so, would there be a delay, or would the process be instantaneous? What about physical objects? Could I transport something from one book to another?

  A new voice caught my attention, not a character from the book but a man arguing with himself. He spoke in sharp, angry s
entences that jumped and fell in volume like a broken radio. I tried to see, and was rewarded with the image of a vague, manlike shape. I had to concentrate to fill in each detail. He was white. Slender, wearing a filthy coverall and heavy boots. A jagged scar ripped the side of his head and face.

  “You think I don’t hear you?” He grabbed a handful of books, snarled, and threw them aside with a careless disregard that made me cringe. No true libriomancer would treat books so harshly. “Always watching. Always spying. Ripping out the pages of my brain.”

  This wasn’t Johannes Gutenberg. The voice was unfamiliar. I couldn’t yet focus well enough to identify the speaker.

  His fingers closed around Rabid, and his tone shifted, becoming deeper. “I see you, Isaac.”

  My mind ran at a manic pace. This is awesome I’m talking to someone through a book oh shit he’s going to kill me how the hell do I get out of here?

  He muttered in Latin, and I saw his words, like hastily scrawled ropes shooting outward. He was trying to lock the book again, with me inside.

  “Who are you?” I demanded, projecting the question with everything I had.

  He hesitated, and I heard . . . I felt different voices trying to respond. James Moriarty. Jakob Hoffman. Doctor Hannibal Lecter. Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Norman Bates.

  There were more, but the original voice shouted them down, struggling to make himself heard. More Latin snaked toward me. He grabbed a pen, scribbling the words onto the pages as he spoke.

  I fled, seeking the magic of the story. If I could follow the killer’s magical current to him, I should be able to follow whatever trail I had left for myself when I reached into the book. But before I could find it, another presence crashed into me from below.

  I screamed, only to have my fear devoured and spilled back over me, increased a thousandfold. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think. I clung to myself as that tide dragged away everything I was. Memories, dreams, everything crumbled like a sand castle on the beach.

  “Isaac!”

  The syllables meant nothing, but I reached out instinctively, like an infant grabbing for his mother.

  My eyes snapped open. My brain rebelled as it tried to reorient to a physical world of light and matter. My throat was hoarse. Lena sat beside me, shaking my shoulders and shouting, but I couldn’t hear her over my own screaming. My vision faded, and I felt myself topple sideways.

  Strong hands caught me, easing me down. My body was rigid, muscles cramping in pain, but I couldn’t relax. I could feel that other presence following me through the book. I didn’t know what he had sent after me, or how. All I knew was that I had to get away; I had to stop it from following.

  My hands were empty. Where was the book?

  There, discarded on the ground. Smudge stood to one side, covered in orange fire. I pointed and screamed something I never would have imagined myself saying. “Burn it!”

  Smudge couldn’t understand English, but he was perfectly fluent in terror. He raced to the book and jumped onto the cover, turning and dancing and igniting the pages.

  “Isaac, look at me!” Lena cradled my face, her eyes wide as she searched mine. “What happened?”

  I shuddered. Sobs ripped through me. I clung to her, trying to shut out the memory of being consumed, of the inhuman rage and hatred that would have drowned me.

  She held me, one hand combing through my hair. “You’re safe,” she whispered, over and over.

  I shook my head and closed my eyes. I don’t know how long I might have stayed there if I hadn’t sensed the magic leaking from the book, brushing my bones. I yelled and jumped to my feet.

  Smudge scurried toward us, leaving blackened weeds in his wake. Behind him, burnt pages fluttered in an unseen breeze: pages damaged both by fire and by magical char.

  Lena grabbed her bokken, raising them both in a defensive stance. “Tell me what happened, Isaac.”

  “I found him.” The words hurt my throat. “He tried to trap me in the book.”

  Only whatever that last attack had been, it hadn’t felt like a magical lock. It was more like . . . hunger. Desperate, furious, raw hunger. The memory started me trembling again. I doubled over and grabbed my knees, squeezing hard so the pain would prove I was still real. That I still existed.

  “Isaac . . .” Lena shifted sideways. “What is that?”

  The book’s movement grew more violent. Pages tore loose, whirling about in tight circles. “I think he sent someone . . . something . . . to follow me.”

  Lena snatched at one of the pages, then swore. Blood welled from her fingertips. She moved to stand between me and the book.

  None of this should have been possible. Peering through books was one thing, but physically reaching through that book to strike another libriomancer? Gray smoke whirled within the pages, coalescing into solid form. This could change everything we knew about libriomancy, and all I wanted to do was flee.

  I forced myself to stand. Characters shouted in my head, their words as loud and real as Lena’s, thanks to my immersion in the book.

  Smudge scrambled up the closest wall, burning like a beacon. This was the sort of threat Gutenberg’s automatons had been created to fight. They could absorb magic, devour whatever this thing was and destroy the book in the process. I, on the other hand, was close to losing myself to my own magic.

  Smoke and blackness began to coalesce. I could feel the thing pushing, struggling to find form. Arms and legs separated from the smoke. A man-shaped shadow took a slow, shuddering step toward us. The whirling pages clung to its body, a blackened paper skin. “I think . . . I think it’s a character from the book.”

  “Which one?”

  I listened to the voices as the thing took another step. “All of them.”

  The figure didn’t seem to care about the various laws of magic its existence violated as it trudged toward us, propelled by the one drive every character in the book shared: the need to destroy their enemies.

  Chapter 13

  I STOOD FROZEN AS THE THING APPROACHED.

  I had faced monsters before. I had my books, my magic . . . if I could shut out the voices long enough to use them. But I didn’t know what we were fighting. It looked like nothing so much as a burnt corpse. There was no face, nothing but faint impressions that could have been eyes and a mouth. I couldn’t even figure out what to call it.

  Lena’s swords flattened in her hands. I could feel the wood responding to her magic, like a low, warm buzz through my bones as the edges grew sharper.

  I shouldn’t have been able to feel it. That was another warning sign. The boundaries between me and magic were dangerously thin.

  “Is that thing contagious?” Lena asked.

  I hadn’t even considered whether it would carry the virus. “Possibly.”

  “No offense, but I don’t like Plan B anymore.” Lena slid one foot forward and swung.

  Her bokken hit the thing’s neck and snapped like a rotten branch. The impact knocked the creature back a step, but didn’t appear to have injured it. Lena stared at her broken weapon.

  Georgia McCain was the protagonist of the book. If this was a conglomeration of characters, she should be the strongest. “Georgia, I know you’re in there. Can you hear me?”

  It snatched up the other piece of her sword and began to gnaw on it, doglike.

  “She’s feeding on magic,” I said. Meaning any weapons I might be able to conjure would be worse than useless. Blasting the thing with a disruptor beam would only make it stronger. I glanced at Smudge, who was staying safely out of the way. But if this got worse, he would try to help. He had to. It was how he was written. And he would be nothing but a bite-sized snack to this thing.

  Lena tossed her swords aside, scooped up a brick, and threw. It tore an ugly wound through Georgia’s shoulder. Paper skin flapped loosely, but
the damage healed within seconds. Lena made a face and retreated toward a broken section of wall, where she ripped out a six-foot length of rusted rebar and gave it a quick spin with both hands. Bits of concrete clung to one end of the bar.

  I backed away as whatever it was lurched toward me. Lena strode up to it and swung her metal staff like a baseball bat. The impact flattened the thing’s head and knocked it to the ground, but it merely groaned and pushed itself to its knees. Lena smashed it back down, spinning her staff to batter it about the head and limbs. “Join in any time.”

  I tried to remember the calming exercises Doctor Shah had insisted on teaching me. I needed to focus, to think, but every time I looked at this thing, I saw only darkness returning to devour me.

  Not just me. It would have to kill Lena to get to me. Smudge, too, unless I found a way to stop it.

  The thing showed no sign of strategy or planning. As far as I could tell, it was simply going after the closest and strongest source of magic.

  “It’s like fighting a piñata from Hell,” Lena said, breathing hard.

  “He didn’t send something through the book,” I said slowly. “He reshaped the book itself.”

  “Terrific. So how do we kill it?”

  Smudge was a magical creature given physical form. You could hurt or kill him by destroying that form, but this was a book, a literal portal to magic. No matter what we did, it could re-form itself.

  A part of me wondered at the limits of such magic. If we flung the damn thing into the sun, how long could it endure? As I had no convenient way of launching it into space, that was a dead end. I needed more time to study the damn thing.

  Lena cried out and jumped back. Her pants leg was torn, and blood dripped down her ankle. “It’s cold!”

  I pulled a cyberpunk book from my jacket. My fingers shook as I flipped to the dog-eared page I wanted. I hesitated. I had performed libriomancy a thousand times, but now I was afraid. I felt like a child again, terrified of the book and what lay beyond.