Libriomancer (9781101597552)

by Hines, Jim C.

  “Hubert sent the automatons to attack the Detroit nest of vampires,” said Lena. “Alice Granach is holding Nidhi Shah as a hostage.”

  Gutenberg stepped toward the desk, examining the books. “There was an old text, bound in leather. I remember Hubert taking it from my library. Have you seen it?”

  I knew exactly which book he meant, and I knew what must have happened to it. Only one other person had entered this office since Hubert’s death.

  “I . . . don’t remember seeing a book like that.”

  He studied me closely, then shrugged. “I’ll find it eventually.”

  Somehow I doubted that.

  Gutenberg grabbed another book from the desk. It opened in his hand. He glanced at the pages, then reached into the book to retrieve a small, black cell phone. “I assume Pallas is overseeing the conflict in Detroit?”

  I nodded dumbly, trying to understand what I had just seen. Gutenberg hadn’t even looked at the cover or title before picking up that book. It was like he had known instinctively which one held the potential magic he wanted, and had opened the book to that exact page.

  “Nothing.” He tossed the phone at the book. It vanished the instant it touched the cover. “They’re following standard containment practice. A single libriomancer uses a book to create an electromagnetic pulse to scramble radios and cameras. Unfortunately, such magic also plays havoc with communications.”

  He gathered a handful of books from the desk, then marched out of the office and through the garage, stopping only briefly to survey the damaged automobiles in the parking lot. A Volkswagen Beetle growled to life and crept toward us. One headlight flipped upward, trying to blind us. The other pulsed with magic.

  That second headlight was the piece that had come from Stephen King’s killer car. I braced myself. Hubert was dead, meaning the remaining cars were free of his control. My arms were useless, but I should be able to stomp these things into—

  Gutenberg snapped his fingers, and flame exploded within the Beetle’s haunted headlight. The magical pseudolife within the car flickered out, and the engine died. Momentum carried the Beetle onward, but it was easy enough to intercept. The car crunched harmlessly into my leg.

  Gutenberg spun in a slow circle, and magical fire blasted the cannibalized parts Hubert had welded to his other cars. I stared at him, trying to understand how a libriomancer could fling magic with such ease. For an instant, his body seemed to flicker. I saw not living flesh but text, skin made up of layer upon layer of pages, a palimpsest of books, magic, and humanity. At the same time, I felt Smudge fade. For that brief span as Gutenberg eliminated the last of Hubert’s guardians, Smudge was simply a spider, oversized and mundane.

  Smudge was a manifestation of a book’s magic. Gutenberg had bypassed the book, stealing Smudge’s magic directly and using it to disable the cars. I felt simultaneously protective of Smudge and eager to figure out the trick myself. “What are you?”

  “Sorry.” Gutenberg winked. “Trade secret.”

  Smudge’s body exploded in fire as his magic returned, and he scrambled around to the back of my head, hiding from Gutenberg.

  “I do appear to owe you both a favor, however.” He looked to Lena first, and nodded. “I know what you want, and I’ll do what I can to reunite you with your lover.” To me, he said, “What would you ask of me, Isaac Vainio?”

  I stared down at myself. “This body—”

  “Given enough time, I might be able to repair it. But returning you to what you were?” He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Though I rarely admit it these days, there are limits to my power. Your body has been destroyed, and libriomancy cannot create life. With the proper texts, I could perhaps construct a caricature of Isaac Vainio, but it would be a shallow thing, a mockery of the man you were. I am not God.”

  This body lacked the physical reactions of my own, but despair hit me hard nonetheless. I felt emptiness, hope sinking away through my gut . . . phantom grief, perhaps, like the shadow pain of a patient with a lost limb. My prosthesis was a five-hundred-year-old creation of wood and brass and magic.

  Lena folded her arms and studied me. “If you can’t get him out of there, then I guess I’ll just have to go in after him.”

  “An automaton is no simple tree,” Gutenberg warned.

  “Simple?” Lena laughed. “Have you ever studied the network of a tree’s roots as it seeks out water? As the tree pipes that water through a body an order of magnitude larger than your own, and does so without the crude central pump that leaves you humans so vulnerable? As it survives winters that would leave you a frozen meatsicle in the snow?”

  I braced myself, but Gutenberg merely laughed. “I concede the point,” he said. “But the automatons weren’t created to house living flesh. You might be able to enter and leave your trees at will without losing your sense of self, but have you ever brought another human being with you?”

  “No,” Lena said softly.

  “Yet you intend to attempt it anyway.” He clucked his tongue and led us back into the office, where he grabbed a Saberhagen novel off the desk. He swiped his fingers through the book, sweeping away the magical lock like smoke. With one hand, he pulled a long, gleaming sword from the pages. “I can’t predict what might happen to you both. You might lose yourself as well as Isaac. If you do manage to succeed, I suspect you’ll have need of this blade. It should heal any physical damage . . . assuming he survives at all. Now if you’ll excuse me, I believe I’m needed in Detroit.”

  “You offered me a favor.”

  He looked pointedly toward the sword. I ignored the hint.

  “Tell me what I saw in Charles Hubert.”

  “You saw that, did you?” He gestured for me to step closer. “Are you sure you want to know?”

  “Yes.”

  “So be it.” He touched my chest, and I felt a tugging sensation, as if a hook had lodged behind my breastbone. “If you survive, I’ll tell you what I know.”

  Gutenberg snapped his fingers, and for a moment, I felt part of the automaton’s magic tear free, enveloping him like a blanket. An instant later, Gutenberg vanished in a flash of sunlight.

  Chapter 23

  I LOOKED UP AT THE CEILING, imagining the sky beyond. The automaton was battered and possibly dying, but surely I had enough strength to make it back to the moon. Could I reach Mars in the time I had left?

  Lena reached for the exposed wood of my face. I pushed her aside. “You’d be risking your life.”

  “I heard the old man, too,” she snapped. “And I’m not interested in any noble bullshit. I’m not letting you die in that thing. Now shut up and hold on.”

  She grabbed my forearm in one hand and cupped my face in the other. Chunks of black wood crumbled away as she tightened her grip on my arm, but she simply squeezed harder. It was a gruesome sight, and I thanked Gutenberg again for not giving his creations a sense of pain.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  I heard her voice inside me, even as the automaton’s senses picked up her words. Her warmth infused the cold, dead wood of my body. Her emotions twined with mine, hot and passionate. Metal blocks fell away, ringing against the floor as she pressed deeper into my body.

  Whatever magic had created Lena Greenwood, her emotions were as genuine and powerful as any I had ever felt. Perhaps more so. It shamed me that I had ever believed otherwise.

  I saw her love for Doctor Shah. Through Lena’s eyes, I saw not the calm, detached psychiatrist who had oh-so-coldly signed the papers that once ended my dreams of magic, but a passionate, devoted woman who walked the border between magic and mundane, giving everything she could to try to help those who fought the demons and the darkness.

  I saw Shah’s grief when a Porter named Jared killed himself four years ago: the deep, shaking sobs she had refu
sed to let anyone but Lena see. I shared Lena’s helplessness as she tried to comfort her lover. In the end, Shah’s grief transformed to determination. Shah worked even harder to help those she could, like a libriomancer whose husband was killed by a spell gone wrong.

  I also saw Lena’s memories of the attack a week before. I heard the crash of furniture from inside the house, where Shah struggled against impossible foes to try to give Lena a few more seconds, and I felt Lena’s anguish as her own strength failed her. I shared her fear, her despair at the death of her tree, and the seductiveness of its death. A part of her had wanted to give up then, to enter her tree and never emerge.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered. To Lena. To Nidhi Shah as well.

  “I told you to shut up.”

  As Lena focused her attention on me, I touched new memories. I saw myself as she saw me, practically glowing with excitement as I worked over the fallen automaton at Hubert’s cabin. I watched my passion and joy turn to outrage as I realized what Gutenberg had done.

  I saw my grief over Ray’s death as we examined his apartment, and my pathetically transparent attempts to keep that grief and pain to myself, to project an aura of strength.

  I saw everything. Lena’s earliest memory, stumbling forth from a tree with no awareness of who or where she was. Her first kiss with Nidhi Shah. A trip they had taken to Wyoming so Lena could try to climb Devil’s Tower, and the nights they had spent in their tent together.

  I had always known Lena was strong enough to break me like a twig, but I had never comprehended her strength as a person. She understood exactly what she was. She knew that someday she would lose Nidhi Shah, and when that happened she would lose herself as well. She knew, and she wasn’t afraid.

  Even the murder of her tree and the loss of her lover hadn’t broken her. She had grieved as deeply as anyone, but like Shah, she turned that grief into another source of strength. She had sought me out, determined to live, to choose what she would become.

  As I explored Lena Greenwood, she did the same, seeing me from within.

  “Wait, you went to the moon?” I felt Lena’s amazement and laughter, her pride as she relived those memories with me, sharing my delight at fulfilling a childhood dream, my sense of wonder as I stared up at our world overhead. My awe at what I had done, and my excitement as I realized how much more magic could accomplish.

  It was in that moment, as I saw myself through her eyes, that Lena reached deeper and pulled.

  I clamped my fingers around her hand without thinking. My true fingers: flesh and blood, and cold like winter snow as they left the emptiness of the automaton’s body and emerged into the night air.

  For several seconds I existed in two bodies at once. The automaton stumbled, and my awareness jolted backward, trying instinctively to recover my balance.

  “Oh, no, you don’t.” Lena’s grip tightened hard enough that my knuckles popped. She pulled harder.

  Metal letters dropped like rain. Pain exploded in my side. I gasped and fell into Lena’s arms. Blood flowed down my side. I had been dying when I crawled into the automaton, and the wound remained. I felt her scoop me up and carry me to the cot. I curled my body into a ball and clutched my side, barely able to think beyond the pain.

  It radiated out from where Lena had stabbed me. I couldn’t breathe. Lena’s bokken must have punctured a lung.

  “Don’t move.” Lena stood over me, examining the metal sword Gutenberg had left. I pointed to my wound, pantomiming what needed to be done. She gripped the hilt in one hand and the blade in the other, aiming the tip at the center of the blood pooling on my side.

  I closed my eyes. I knew the sword was made to heal, but that didn’t mean I wanted to watch her stab me with it.

  Warmth spread through my ribs, and I gasped, filling my lungs for the first time in what felt like weeks.

  I looked up to see Lena dragging the sword through my body like an oar, sweeping away injuries both old and new. Not only had I retained the injuries I had suffered before I joined with the automaton, I had somehow managed to gain new ones while trapped within that body. My mind immediately began picking through competing theories as to how that could have happened, but the result was burnt, blistered skin, bruised flesh, and several broken bones.

  One by one, Lena sliced my wounds away. I had to close my eyes when she brought the blade to my face. After this, I’d never worry about visiting a dentist again. Nothing they did could compare to Lena fixing my battered jaw with a broadsword.

  “That should do it.” The cot shifted as Lena sat down beside me.

  I tested my limbs. I felt the same. I looked the same. She had even fixed the scar on the back of my right hand where I had cut myself on Captain Hook’s sword seven years ago. “Um . . . I don’t suppose I could trouble you for clothes?”

  Lena’s eyes sparkled. “Where’s the fun in that?”

  Tiny, hot feet tickled my leg as Smudge climbed my body. I held perfectly still, torn between relief and nervousness. He made his way to my shoulder and settled down, watching the door.

  “I believe they’re ready,” came Gutenberg’s voice from outside.

  I yelped and pulled my knees to my chest as the door swung open and Gutenberg entered, followed by Nicola Pallas and Deb DeGeorge. Pac-Man and another of Pallas’ animals snarled at me, straining at the chains Pallas gripped in her fist. Four automatons stood behind them. I also saw what was left of the automaton I had commandeered.

  It stood motionless, the metal blocks scattered in a circle on the floor. Roots had sprouted from the feet, punching into the cement floor. Green buds clung to the fingertips. Tiny branches like shiny brown spikes protruded from the neck and head.

  “Not bad,” said Gutenberg. He held one of the buds in his fingertips.

  “Not bad at all.” Lena was still looking at me. My neck grew warm.

  Gutenberg’s brows rose, but he said nothing as he picked up both Excalibur and the sword Lena had used to heal me. Pallas stepped past him, studying me from one angle after another, all the while humming the Linus and Lucy theme from Charlie Brown. Pac-Man sniffed my feet. The other animal growled, but Pac-Man nipped it on the ear, and the growl changed to a yip of pain.

  “Sit,” Pallas snapped. Both animals dropped to their haunches. Blood matted Pac-Man’s side. The other one trembled, as if it could barely restrain itself from ripping out my throat.

  Deb stood in the doorway, looking like she wanted nothing more than to flee. She was covered in dust and dirt, and her skin was paler than before. She kept one hand to her hip, and her face was taut with pain. “Good to see you in one piece, hon.”

  “What’s going on?” asked Lena. Her attention was on Pallas’ animals. She kept her fingers spread, ready to seize them both.

  Gutenberg held up a hand, waiting for Pallas to finish whatever she was doing. She took her sweet time, getting far too up close and personal for my taste, before straightening. Only then did the humming stop. She had gone for at least five minutes without pausing for breath.

  “It’s him,” she said, hauling her beasts back. “Only him.”

  “In the flesh,” I said weakly.

  It was Deb who finally took pity on me. She unzipped her jacket and handed it to me.

  I hesitated. “No offense, but the last time I saw you, you shot up my living room and then tried to poison me.”

  “That will not happen again,” Gutenberg said firmly. “I took a page from your book, Isaac. Nothing so crude as the bomb you implanted in Ted Boyer, but I promise you Ms. DeGeorge will not act against us in the future.”

  Deb scowled, but didn’t say anything.

  I wrapped the jacket around my waist like a makeshift kilt, tying the sleeves together at the hip. “How did you get back so quickly? Wait, how long were we in there?”

  “Long enough for us t
o begin cleaning up the damage Hubert did.” Gutenberg returned the sword to its book. “I left you three hours ago.”

  Three hours. It had felt like minutes.

  “It’s a disaster,” Deb said quietly. “Like a bomb went off at the daycare center.”

  “We have people working the perimeter,” Gutenberg went on. “They’ll keep the mundanes out and the vampires in until we can cover up the most obvious signs of magic.”

  “Signs like a big freaking elevator shaft into the center of the Earth?” Deb asked. “Yeah, people might have a few questions about that.”

  “How many . . .?” Lena asked quietly.

  “Our preliminary count is between thirty and forty humans dead,” said Pallas. “Most were killed by vampires in the chaos. We won’t have a verified casualty list for at least a week. We’ll be monitoring the morgues to make sure everyone stays dead. At least a hundred more saw the fighting. Information on vampire casualties is rougher, since few of them leave corpses behind. We estimate that the automatons slaughtered at least fifty. It will be days before anyone can figure out how many more might have fled.”

  Close to a hundred lives, maybe more, snuffed out in a single night by one deranged libriomancer.

  “The vampires have telepaths among their kind,” Gutenberg said. “They’ll gather up any of their number who might have strayed.”

  “And do what with them?” asked Pallas. “They murdered innocent people—”

  “They were running for their lives,” Deb shot back. “Running from your killer mannequins.”

  “Enough,” Gutenberg interrupted. “I’m not prepared to escalate the war Charles Hubert worked so hard to try to create.”

  “So it’s contained?” I stared at them, trying to believe it. Trying to focus not on the death, but on how much worse things could have been. “We stopped Hubert in time?”

  “You did,” said Gutenberg. “Though it will take months to fully contain the damage. I’ll be diverting one automaton to Taipei, where the vampires are currently engaged in a full-fledged civil war. Another will go to Kaliningrad to deal with a libriomancer who, in my absence, has been offering his services to the Russian mob.”