Bookburners

by Max Gladstone

From a distance, as they flew over the city, nothing in London seemed out of place. There were its illuminated, overlapping webs of streets, as if dozens of giant spiders had raced each other to claim as much territory as possible, and reached an uneasy truce when their webs met. Shah remembered how much she liked flying. There was the snake of the Thames, the disc of the London Eye. And as they circled closer, the plumes of smoke rising on the riverbanks. The monsters fighting in the air over the water.

  That was new.

  One had its mouth around the other’s head. The other was growing limbs; as they got closer, it fastened those limbs around what Shah saw as a serpent, as if to try to rip it in half. Shah risked a quick glance around at all the buildings, all the people who must be seeing this. It didn’t matter, she thought, whether cameras couldn’t capture it. This many eyewitnesses wouldn’t be convinced later that this spectacle had been a dream.

  Other members of Team One caught Shah’s eye. She gave the command to attack. Burnham and Tsukuda were first, carrying Pinho and Gagnier. Burnham, whose equipment gave him wings like a falcon, gave five quick flaps and then dove, with Pinho in his clutches. Tsukuda’s metallic wings were more like those of a bat; she skittered through the air not far behind. Pinho was first to make contact, landing on the head of the serpent. She drew a pole from its holster on her back. The pole elongated in both directions into a shining spear, which Pinho then drove through the serpent’s skull. The serpent’s eyes widened. The giant head twitched. It should have been enough to get Pinho off, but Shah knew Pinho had been ready for it; on Pinho’s orders, her boots had stuck to the serpent’s skin, and it would take more than a shake to dislodge her. Meanwhile, Tsukuda flitted in and dropped Gagnier onto the other monster’s shoulder. Gagnier drew a sword with a toothed blade like a saw, drove it into the flesh beneath him, and began cutting a trench into the monster’s flesh. Burnham and Tsukuda pulled away and circled back with bows, unleashing volleys of arrows into both creatures. Shah nodded to herself. She was proud of them. She caught the eyes of Soo and Ellsdale and was about to order them to fall back—maybe those first four soldiers could finish this job—when three arms the size of a man burst from the flesh around Gagnier, grabbed him by the legs and neck, and pulled him apart at the seams. Soo and Ellsdale had seen it, too. Shah nodded.

  A larger arm shot out of the back of the monster, its head still in the serpent’s mouth, and caught Burnham in midair. It crushed one of his wings and dropped him. Shah decided losing one man was enough today. Narrowing her own metallic wings, she dropped like a stone and caught Burnham before he hit the water, then channeled the force of her dive into a climb. The gauntlets she was wearing let her hang onto Burnham with one hand. He was unconscious. It didn’t matter. In the other hand, she pulled out her favorite sword from the Vatican arsenal.

  She watched as the big arm caught Tsukuda, held her too tight. Crushed her and let her go. She fell to the river.

  Shah let her anger drive her. The sword grew to a size that seemed almost comical to her every time she saw it, yet to her it was feather-light. She kept rising, flapping her wings to keep up her speed, and passed close enough to the arm to lop it off at the shoulder. Noted with satisfaction the beast’s cry of pain, even from inside the serpent’s mouth, as the arm spun toward the water and broke apart with a splash. Now Soo and Ellsdale knew what to do. Under Soo’s wings, they held each other tight, placed their spears between them, and began spinning, turning themselves into a drill. Before the creature could stop them, they bored a hole through its body, turned and bored another one, another one. The creature shuddered and wilted. This was just the opening the serpent needed. It pulled in the head and neck up to the creature’s shoulders and clamped down. Now the perforated body fell toward the water. The serpent’s jaws worked up and down, black fluid spraying from its mouth.

  It was then that Shah made what she later understood was a mistake. She believed the pieces in the water were out of the fight and ordered her soldiers to concentrate on the serpent. That creature didn’t put up the fight she expected, though it was also much harder to wound. But wound it they did. It was soon thrashing in the air, leaking a clear liquid that sprayed Shah once as she passed. It got in her eyes, her nose, her mouth, and Shah realized it was water. A little musky, a little tidal. But just water.

  They thought they were almost finished when two dark shapes leapt out of the water, things with sleek wings and long beaks. One of them was trying to skewer her and she dodged out of its way just in time. For her. Burnham suddenly felt much lighter. She looked down and saw that the flying thing had bitten him in half. The second creature, meanwhile, had landed on the neck of the serpent next to Pinho, and before Pinho could turn to defend herself, snapped her head off.

  That was when Soo and Ellsdale swerved in and used their drill on the creature that had killed Pinho. This time they left nothing to chance; they kept it spinning on the end of their spears while Ellsdale held out another blade nearby to pulverize it as it spun. They did the same to the other creature in short order.

  That left only the serpent, now hovering over the water, growing weaker and weaker. It didn’t seem to even be interested in attacking them, but Shah wasn’t going to take any more risks. She ordered Soo and Ellsdale to join her, and together the three of them drove their weapons into the serpent’s head and what Shah was pretty sure was its chest. It fell into the river, and the water exploded around it. And it stayed there.

  • • •

  “Oh, no,” Sal heard Perry say.

  The water that used to be in the river hung in the air. Frozen. The river was full of pink light, and the light was changing the land, making it move, making it creep.

  “What’s happening?” Sal said.

  “Things just got much worse,” Perry said.

  Above them, tendrils of light rose into the night sky, filling it, turning it to a pink dawn.

  “Amazing,” Frances said.

  Now they saw Shah, Soo, and Ellsdale circling to get out of the way of the light. They seemed to spot Team Three on the ground and banked to reach them, skidding into a landing.

  They looked hard at each other, Team One and Team Three. Sal could see it on everyone’s face. A breach was open. The flood of magic had begun. It was the culmination of their worst fears, the realization of the thing they’d all trained for years to try to avoid. Now their very efforts had made it come to pass, and each side was ready to defend its choices, blame the other for what had happened. Sal could hear the fight now. You should never have killed the river. You should never have woken it up. You should never have taken the boat. All the things they should never have done. But they had been done. And Sal knew that at the moment, there was no use talking about them.

  “What do we do now?” she said. She leaned hard on the word we, and saw Shah relax.

  “I don’t know,” Shah said. “This has never happened before.” It was a brave admission on her part. An opening to work together, instead of just following orders.

  Menchú took a breath. “But the mission is the same.”

  “We need to save lives,” Shah said.

  “We need to close the breach,” Asanti said.

  “Right now, those could be two different things,” Shah said.

  “All right then,” Sal said. “We have work to do.” She turned to Harris. “This is about to get a lot worse. You need our help.”

  Harris nodded, mute. The light in the sky reflected in her eyes. She was not weeping, yet.

  “Okay, then,” Sal said. “I’ll find a dispatch station so we can coordinate with the police while Team One recovers.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Perry said.

  “Me too,” Liam said. “We’ll take Grace.”

  Sal turned to Harris. “Where to? We need a well-fortified place, and one that’s not so dependent on technology.”

  Harris managed a wry smile. “Fortunately our fair metropolis happens to have just the thing.”

  “Th
e Tower of London?” Liam said.

  Harris nodded.

  “Soo. Ellsdale,” Shah said. “Take a few others from Team One and go with them. They’ll need the firepower.”

  Soo and Ellsdale both gave a small salute.

  “Thanks,” Sal said to Shah.

  Shah motioned to the unconscious Grace. “We owe her,” she said.

  • • •

  Menchú watched Sal and her newly created team go, into the transformed streets of a changing city. They hadn’t wasted too much time saying goodbye to one another. But he hoped Sal knew how proud he was of her.

  Now Shah, Asanti, and Frances were making plans. Around them, the police and reserve soldiers were scrambling.

  He looked at the frozen wave, the light rising into the sky. The next move was unclear, but they would think of something. They didn’t have a choice.

  “Arturo,” said an unfamiliar voice with an English accent. Menchú turned. It was a police officer, not one he’d seen before. He wondered how this man knew his name, until he got a look at the man’s eyes. Pale as the moon. Like a German shepherd’s eyes.

  “I see you finally graduated from using children,” he said.

  “I tried to find one around here,” Hannah said, “but they’ve all been evacuated.”

  “Good,” Menchú said. “What do you want?”

  “I’m here to tell you I’m through,” Hannah said.

  “You’ll pardon me, once again, if I don’t believe you.”

  Hannah made the officer laugh. “Of course! You’ve never believed anything I say. Why should you start now?” Now Hannah’s face grew serious. “Yet it’s true. Because you’ve ruined everything now. The project, the experiment, your world, your universe. I tried to keep it together for longer than you can imagine. Longer than my colleagues wanted. Some of them said to give it up ages ago, but I stayed. I put in the hours. The centuries. I tried to keep this world together, shoring it up and fixing the cracks here, letting out pressure there—”

  “Killing hundreds in the process,” Menchú said.

  “Hundreds of people,” Hannah said. “What are hundreds of people? What are thousands, tens of thousands? If we had decided to give up the project when the first few of us abandoned it, do you how many people would have died then? I’ll tell you: everyone. Everyone, Menchú. And so long ago that your great-grandparents would never have had a chance to be born. And here you weep for a few dozen, all because you had to watch.”

  Menchú chose not to respond to that.

  “I never gave up on this universe,” Hannah said. “I always believed in what we had built here. Yes, there were flaws. How could there not be flaws? But I could always see past them to the beauty at its center. Order created out of chaos—but an order teeming with energy, with movement, and in time, with life. You have no idea how much life. I believe that we were on the cusp of something even greater still—not just life, but purpose. It lay just out of reach, and I would have spent an eternity reaching it, so long as I had even a little help.”

  Hannah made the officer’s face fall. “But now I see I’ve lost,” Hannah said. “I see now that my trust in you, my judgment about the Society—the Society and so much else—was misplaced. You were never as willing as you needed to be to do what was right.”

  “Right?” Menchú said. “You want to lecture me about what’s right?”

  “What I really want,” Hannah said, “is to show you my true self. If you survived that, I would ensure you lived only a few seconds more, in the full and complete knowledge of everything you decided to thwart. But there’s no point to that now. It changes nothing about the irreparable damage you’ve done.”

  The police officer Hannah embodied looked toward the pink light in the sky with utter disgust, and then back to Menchú.

  “You can never make this whole again,” she said. “I hope you know that. And if you live to see the consequences, you will understand why I was willing to sacrifice so much. A hundred dead? A hundred thousand? You will see billions die as the land disintegrates beneath their feet while the stars explode over their heads and the dome of Heaven shatters. And my colleagues have the gall to call that an acceptable loss. Good luck in the apocalypse, Father Menchú. It won’t save you, or anything else.”

  Menchú knew Hannah well enough to expect the worst, then. Maybe she would break the police officer’s body in half, or cause him to explode, or throw him into the sky. Instead, she just left. The officer’s eyes darkened, and a look of confusion grew on his face.

  “What just happened?” the officer said.

  Menchú debated what to tell him.

  “Do you have a family?” he said.

  “Yeah,” the officer said.

  “Go and be with them,” Menchú said. “I’m going to be with mine.”

  Bookburners

  Season 3, Episode 13

  Live in London

  Max Gladstone

  1.

  Headless monsters stormed the Tower of London.

  Sergeant Radcliffe held the door open on the bridge, and waved the tourists in. “Come on! It’s safe in the Tower!” He didn’t know that, none of the Warders had any idea what was going on, but as the London skyline wriggled and reshaped around them, now burning, now ancient, now breathing, as the river seethed with alien light, the Tower grounds remained unchanged. Ghost bombs hadn’t struck inside the walls, the stone could not catch flame, and the monsters weren’t here yet.

  This was not a dream. Radcliffe himself might be cracked, but he’d had enough practice in the last year, shaking through his Iraq nightmares, to learn the difference between dream and real. They’d given him this temporary post, a brief rotation as a Yeoman Warder, and a position they called relief: parade, look sharp, look British, wear this silly bright red coat, work with these kind old Warrant Officers, let tourists snap your picture. You’ve done your country proud. Let us care for you a while, before we send you out to kill again.

  The last of the tourists rushed past, and behind him Creighton shouted, “Close the door!” and Sergeant Radcliffe really should have done so.

  But: “There’s more of them out there!”

  The headless closed in.

  Many heads had rolled in the square outside the Tower, back in the old days of Jack Ketch, but the bodies never came back before. Zombies, you might call them, but they weren’t corpses, more like memories: They squeezed out of the ground through the hair-thin gaps between paving stones, their necks bare humps of flesh, wearing tattered clothes, half there, half not; a woman in a ragged robe tackled a tourist and tore at his neck with her hands until the neck pulled like taffy, and she pried the head free. The woman plopped it down on her own neck, heinously mis-sized. The tourist’s mouth gaped, gnashing its teeth.

  A group of Middle Eastern tourists—a few men, two women in abayas—stood up the hill, separated from the bridge by headless; the cobblestones behind them were turning into mouths, so they couldn’t get out that way. There was a kid with them: a boy, screaming.

  Creighton grabbed Radcliffe’s shoulder. “Leave ’em!”

  “Give me five minutes,” Radcliffe said.

  “You can’t fight through that on your own. They’ll take your head clean off.”

  “Give me your spear.”

  Creighton’s eyes were cold and gray. Radcliffe didn’t know how his own eyes looked. They’d been blue, once, but it had been a while since he looked in the mirror. But he felt stable now, secure, unafraid for the first time since he’d come home. Wished Mary could have seen him. Those gray eyes weighed him, and, Radcliffe knew, weighed the rumors about him that had gone round the Yeoman Warders’ table, old soldiers gossiping about who Radcliffe was, what he’d done to end up here, the way a muscle in his jaw tightened when he heard a loud snap, or a breaking stick, or the clatter when a workman let a shovel fall.

  Creighton gave him the spear.

  Radcliffe ran across the bridge, toward the tourists.

  He�
��d never used a spear before, though he’d trained with bayonets. Screaming, he swung it like a bat; tripped one headless up, broke a second’s knee.

  One of the tourists fell. A headless in doublet and hose reached for Radcliffe, and he broke its arm, but another headless in a wedding dress caught his side, and though there was no heat he felt his flesh ripple under her touch, felt it stick to her fingers. He hit her in the chest with the butt of the spear, shoved her back. When her hand left his side, he bled into that silly red uniform coat.

  He reached the tourists. “Get in,” he shouted. “Back to the Tower! I’ll protect you.” They turned to him, terrified, eyes wide. He tried again in Arabic, saw them understand; lips moved, but his blood was pounding too hard to hear them say, Thank you.

  They ran past him toward the bridge, as the headless closed in. He fought rear guard, swinging his spear, and gave ground step by step—did not let them touch him. Blood flowed out from the wound in his side, and strength left him with blood, but not determination. The spear weighed nothing. He weighed nothing. He could fight like this forever. It felt so clean.

  He glanced back, and saw the family reach the bridge. Turned to run, himself.

  A headless caught his arm. He roared, and struck, but the spear slipped from his grip, and he fell. His skull rang against cobblestones. Headless closed in, hands out.

  Radcliffe was ready to die.

  Then an enormous blade cleaved one of the headless through the waist; thin chains wound around another and tossed it back; a mailed fist slammed through the chest of a third, and someone shot a fourth in the back. In moments the headless parted, and Radcliffe saw his saviors.

  There were two knights: real knights, like in stories, Sir Gawain and the Green, only with more patchwork armor, and they had guns, and one was a lady. Between them stood a burly, tattooed man, supporting an apparently unconscious Chinese woman—and a man and a woman Radcliffe could tell were Americans even before they spoke. The trainers gave it away. The man was sort of glowing, which wasn’t quite so typically American, but while Radcliffe had never been trained in rules of engagement with the preternatural, he did his best not to hold odd skin conditions against people who hadn’t yet tried to kill him.