Bookburners

by Max Gladstone

  The American woman helped Radcliffe to his feet; the knights fanned out to cover their retreat. The cobblestones farther up the hill, apparently unsatisfied with the mouths they had sprouted already, grew legs, and rushed toward them in a scurrying fanged tide.

  “Is the Tower safe?” the American woman asked. Her voice cut through Radcliffe’s pain, and he found himself respecting her automatically, as he respected any new officer. Whoever she was, she had authority: The others looked to her, and she seemed comfortable in this world gone mad.

  “Yes,” he said, at once, clipped, reporting. “Yes ma’am. But—”

  “What is it, soldier?”

  “The ravens. They melted into one another and flew off.”

  “Good.” Radcliffe didn’t understand how that could be good, exactly, but the American seemed to know what she was doing, so he didn’t argue. “Let’s get inside.” That last she’d called back to the others; they retreated to the bridge, to the gate. “Do you have a communications center in the Tower? Something you can use to talk to police? The military?”

  “I—I think so. Yes.”

  “I need it. We have to coordinate our response, protect people.”

  “With all due respect”—despite Radcliffe’s pain, he felt respect was certainly due—“who are you, ma’am?”

  “My name is Sal Brooks,” she replied as they passed through the Tower gates. “And we’re from the Vatican.”

  • • •

  The great Tower raven flew, for the first time.

  Twenty-eyed and many-winged, he/she circled through a sky crushed pink as peachskin, born on the rush of magic: eddies of a world no longer chained. London lay beneath, a city centuries had bent into a tense, painful crouch—she strained, shifted against her mind-forged manacles, felt them melt and bend, knew her power, began to rise.

  The great Tower raven understood that pain, that first testing of an unexpected chance. Long ago, in a past dulled by terror, men had carved the raven’s wings, plucked his/her flight pinions, called this mutilation mercy: You’ll be cared for, sheltered, and fed, no need to soar, just squat here to guard us against a doom we doubt will come. Generations passed. And then came the flood of magic, which was possibility, and all the raven’s tiny pieces merged together, forged whole wings from their shattered bits, and spread them to embrace the terror freedom of the sky.

  He/she turned and flew, brilliant, beautiful black, alone. Alone, at first, and then: no more.

  New currents scored heaven. The raven wheeled away, scrambled for purchase on the sky. Great translucent shapes slipped past, massive distortions in the new uncertainty, taut round sides made of skin, not canvas, their iron eagle insignias more monstrous even than they’d been in life, taloned and tentacled. Deadly, double their real antecedents’ size, they drifted from dreams of adult children who’d once heard their parents, and their parents’ parents, tell dark stories of nights and flame.

  The raven righted him/herself, gathered wind, slipped away. But pinprick strikes stippled its back, ruffled its wings: ghost gunners in the ghost ships, jealous of the air.

  Men: Even as ghosts, they tried to shoot the raven down.

  But the raven would not cede the sky; claws flexed, and spreading great and many wings, the raven spun through a tight spiral as he/she had seen hawks spin, calling on ancestral dreams of flight, rumors passed down generation by generation against a day of freedom. The raven gained great height. The bullets stopped: They could not shoot around the curve of their great skin balloons.

  The city below shrank till he/she could hold it in a glance. London’s raven had never seen London before, not like this, nor had any of the little ravens who made him/her up: laid out to choke a snaking river, shattered streets, broken curves, age. The raven did not know what was new, or old, or usual. Perhaps the streets always flexed, curled, uncurled like that, like wind spiraling against a cliff. Perhaps the many ghosts of Winston Churchill always chased pensioners and tourists from their war-room bunker into a Hyde Park where the grass had grown to finger length and begun to grasp, where boats and punters melted together, where bridges galloped and doors opened in mist to other worlds. Perhaps Romans always marched down Downing Street. Perhaps the clocks were always striking thirteen.

  But the raven did not think so. This was fresh. New. The city, like the raven, was enjoying itself.

  The raven reached a diving height and, aping birds of prey, he/she folded all his/her wings and fell, blurred down toward land at speed, hooked talons into zeppelin skin and tore a long strip free to bare fishlike bones, and the structure crumpled and drifted down, knocking its fellow off course as it rained ghosts upon the writhing city. The raven, croaking triumph, reclaimed the sky.

  • • •

  Asanti really wished Thavani Shah would shut up, so she could appreciate this moment.

  Asanti was too smart—just—to say that to the other woman’s face, especially when Team One’s leader had given herself over to full drill sergeant tirade. In Asanti’s experience with military people—which Team One’s role in the Society had rendered far more extensive than she had ever imagined back when she was a girl of twenty-two just finishing her first doctorate—military folk had a certain rhythm in complaint, exhortation, or command. Interrupting this rhythm only upset them further. Perhaps, with a grant and some free time, one could establish this rhythm’s role in their rhetoric, learn to exploit or compromise it; she suspected it soothed, a sort of verbal cradle-rocking, only with expletives.

  So Shah commanded center stage, and cursed, and railed. Frances, in her wheelchair, listened. So did Arturo Menchú, staring, stricken, at the skyline, at the sky, at the monsters.

  Asanti watched the river. The Thames she knew, the Thames she’d seen so many times before, was an imperial waterway, slate gray with shades of brown, a river that had seen too much and settled into a false calm to contemplate its prior traumas, and the treasures it had long since locked within its muddy bed; it lacked the fierce and periodic floods that had made the Romans wall the Tiber off.

  Now, it was making up for lost time.

  A crack ran down the center of the river, where the enormous eel-god they’d summoned from the Thames had fallen; its collapse had thrown out enormous waves that stuck in the air, gleaming, still wet, but the corpse had vanished behind the pinkish light that rolled from the crack, obscuring the Tower Bridge, and joining earth and sky.

  The flood had come.

  If she were another woman, she might have prayed. She had waited for this moment all her life. Studied lesser manifestations. Learned to contain them, and control them. But now the magic came for her, all at once, gorgeous and grotesque, erupted into time. There was so much to study. She had to take notes. Every moment here, listening, was lost data: a wealth of observation slipping between her fingers, as if she sifted jewels. And still, Shah would not stop talking.

  Oh. Wait, never mind. Shah had, indeed, stopped, and was looking at Asanti with that pointed pop-eyed expression that suggested she expected some sort of answer. “Surely,” Asanti said, imagining what she would have been saying herself, were she Thavani Shah, “you don’t blame me for this. Your people chopped the river spirit in half with a sword.”

  The corporal darkened a shade, and her eyes narrowed, which suggested that Asanti’s response had been at least reasonably on topic. “Without your ritual, there wouldn’t have been a river monster in the first place!”

  “Second place,” Asanti corrected. “The angel let out the City Eaters first, which she would have done even if I had not resisted her. Our river spirit fought that creature to a standstill, until, not to belabor the point, your team cut it in half with a sword. We saved the city.”

  “Oh, yes,” Shah said. Across the river, the London Eye winked at them. The Ferris wheel had sprouted fleshlike sails, and turned, but the enormous cat’s eye that filled the wheel’s interior somehow remained still and steady. Ghost zeppelins drifted overhead, dropping bombs that
destroyed buildings which hadn’t existed seconds ago. Big Ben appeared to have sprouted legs, and was trying to walk, but Parliament kept lashing out tentacles to hold it down. “It would be terrible if the city were destroyed by magic.” Up the bank, a fuzzy centipede-thing bowled past Shah’s Team One guards and scuttled toward them, mandibles clattering, before a guard shot it in the head. “It would be a true shame if someone were to have let that happen.”

  “You’re missing the point.”

  Shah holstered her weapon. “Archivist, with all due respect, I think I’m not the one who’s missed the point.”

  The air battle that had so captivated Menchú seemed to have resolved: a great, black, many-winged beast carved the last ghost zeppelin to ribbons, and flew off. “We need to stop this,” he said. Asanti had half expected him to shout. He sounded so quiet. That calm hit her harder than a scream. Shah’s anger, Asanti could understand and classify: She saw no answer to this mess, so she released pressure in the only way she knew. Menchú, faced with the collapse of everything he’d worked to protect, at his own hands, no less, should have broken—but instead fell back on an unknown internal skeleton, and found he could bear more weight than he’d ever imagined, and finding that, found himself responsible for bearing up when it would have been so much easier to shatter.

  Shah did not know the priest so well; she scoffed. “I hadn’t thought of that. We’ll just ask the monsters to stop, shall we?”

  That scorn flowed over Menchú like wind, and passed, leaving him untouched. “We need to stop this: screaming at one another. Trying to score points. The Society’s mission is broken. That’s where we are. Accusations later. Work, now.”

  “Napalm,” Shah said. Smoke rose from the dead monster behind her.

  “You can’t firebomb London.” Overhead, ghosts, or memories, continued doing just that. “Millions of people live here.”

  “Not for much longer. That’s what the napalm’s for.”

  “It wouldn’t help. You won’t close the rift in the Thames with napalm. The magic’s sinking into brick, into marble. You won’t be able to burn it out. We need another idea.” He turned to Asanti.

  “You want her in charge?” Shah boggled.

  “She’s our only hope.”

  In those childish private dreams common to all visionaries not recognized in their own time, Asanti had often imagined the triumph of this moment: her heterodox position, her secret research, not merely useful but required—not as a private compromise within Team Three, but by the Society as a whole. The real event felt less exhilarating than she had dreamed. People were dying.

  The cough, behind Menchú, was almost lost beneath the nearby automatic weapons fire. Menchú stepped back, turned: Behind him, Frances had raised her hand. “I have an idea.”

  2.

  Sal marched into the security office. Televisions blared static; security cameras showed the hall with the moving walkway and the crown jewels and the coronation video, looping. Perry helped Liam lower Grace into a chair. Screams filtered in from outside. The guard watching the cameras stood up. “Who the hell are you, then?”

  Before the Beefeater who’d let them in could explain, Sal spoke.

  “We’re the people who know what’s going on.” In spite of everything, she liked saying that: liked taking charge, laying bare all the secrets of her last three years, liked being honest. The worst had happened—a lot of worsts had happened—but it felt comfortable to know where she stood. “I’m Sal Brooks, and these are my colleagues. We’re from the Vatican.”

  “I’m Church of England.”

  “Good for you. Have you ever fought demons?”

  “Ah,” the man said. “No?”

  “Then you should listen to us anyway. Can you patch us through to the police? Military?”

  The guard looked skeptical, but the Beefeater—Radcliffe, that was his name—cut in: “They saved my life, Greg.”

  The Team One knights, Ellsdale and Soo, took up positions near the door, weapons drawn. They looked ready for anything—anything, that is, except explanations. Team One had never been good at those. But Sal was done hiding. “London’s under attack. People are in danger. I can help, but I need to get everyone working together. Now. Do you have a line out?”

  “To Scotland Yard,” the man stammered. “And a line to the army. But you can’t get through. I’ve tried, and there’s only static.”

  “Perry?”

  The guard, at that point, noticed the glow, and began screaming. Perry rolled his eyes. “What do you want?”

  “Can you help with that at all? Cut through the interference somehow?”

  “I can’t magic all your problems away, you know.”

  Sometimes this weird Perry-angel merger could seem utterly alien. Other times, he reminded Sal exactly of her brother. “Can you deal with this one?”

  He approached the desk and muttered, “This is a lot harder than it looks.” When he touched the metal surface, his glow concentrated in his hands, and the monitors blushed red—but pictures cohered from the static, and the speakers squealed to life.

  “Looks pretty hard,” Sal said.

  “Still, though.”

  The squeal resolved to voices, mostly men talking all at once:

  “—came out of nowhere—bat wings—like The War of the bloody Worlds—the Strand is flowing, like a river—the angel from the Old Bailey, she’s—officers down—suspect in a frock coat, with a long knife, stalking the West End—zeppelins—zombies pouring out of Highgate—RAF dogfighting German fighter planes—”

  “Can you broadcast me over all frequencies?”

  Perry frowned. “I don’t have that much control.”

  Liam left Grace in the chair, and stepped behind the desk. After thirty seconds, a spark, and a curse, he emerged. “There. Fixed it.”

  Perry’s head turned toward Sal while the rest of his body held deathly still. “What will you tell them?”

  Sal grinned, and thumbed the mic. “This is Sal Brooks of the Vatican Police. All units: I’ve done this before.” Not exactly, but, hell, they didn’t know that, did they? “Bullets won’t work—reliably. Get civilians to sanctuary in churches—any holy ground, but the older the better. Find consecrated silver or holy water; that will protect you from the effects of magic.”

  “Magic?” A man’s voice drowned out the others over the radio. “Brooks, this is Superintendent James Quill. Explain yourself.”

  “You’re in charge?”

  “I bloody well think so.”

  “Quill,” she said, after rejecting sir, since whatever this guy’s rank, he was pretty much a newbie so far as Society business was concerned, “I’m your best chance at getting through this. Magic’s real. I’ve been fighting it for years. And now it’s come to London. You and your men know the territory, but you don’t know how to win. My team does. Now. Will you work with me?”

  Crackling silence. More screams. Christ. They weren’t going to buy it—they’d just try to macho through, stiff upper lip, they wouldn’t listen to her, and then they’d all die, along with the people they were trying to protect.

  Quill’s voice crackled on the line. “Go ahead, Ms. Brooks.”

  She heard more screams outside. Damn. Something must have come over the walls—or down from on high. She glanced over her shoulder—Soo and Ellsdale were already running. She should go with them, help. Team One wasn’t used to working with normcore law enforcement—or stinting on civilian casualties, for that matter.

  Liam moved before she could ask him to. “I’ll take care of the courtyard. You save London, all right?”

  “All right.” She cracked her knuckles, then leaned toward the mic. “Okay, Quill. Here’s what we’re gonna do.”

  • • •

  Liam caught up with the knights at the foot of the stairs. Soo and Ellsdale flanked the door into the courtyard; Soo had her wings on, and Ellsdale’s chains clattered over one another, snakes rustling sand. He envied their confidence. They
looked like they knew what they were doing; they looked like the world wasn’t ending. Maybe it wasn’t, for them. Team One belonged in this kind of mess. “I’ll take them from up top,” Soo was saying—she had a faint British accent. “You catch them down below, and we’ll tweak their noses. Easy.” She’d seen friends die today, she might die any minute, and still she had a broad, crooked Christmas-morning smile. “Should be fun.”

  Ellsdale tested the fit of his clawed gauntlets. “I’ll take care of any infected on the ground.”

  “No,” Liam said from the stair.

  Ellsdale turned, raised an eyebrow. “That’s procedure. Neutralize infections so they don’t spread.”

  “The world’s infected now, you git. Do you mean to destroy it as well?”

  Ellsdale didn’t answer, which was a kind of answer all its own.

  “Just get the people to one side, for now. Save them.”

  “He’s right, you know,” Soo said.

  Ellsdale frowned before bursting out the door. Liam followed him and stopped.

  There was an octopus in the courtyard.

  Octopus wasn’t exactly the right word, but while vocabulary wasn’t Liam’s strong suit, he doubted there was a right word for this in English, or any other human language for that matter. The creature had a swollen, ridged central body, with at least one beaked mouth he could see, and a mass of long, thin tentacles, their skin made of segmented stone. Torn brickwork and shattered glass near the curtain wall suggested a clear path: The thing must have climbed over and down, killing as it came.

  Bodies lay sprawled and tangled on the ground. Tourists fled. A mother ran past, seeking panicked children in the herd, cried: “Peter!” A thin, ropy tentacle snared a big man around the waist and tossed him into the beaked mouth. As the mouth gaped, Liam saw people inside, melted, melting, not yet dead. Smoke and panic; torn soil; the creature’s four-point pupils burned lava red. Ellsdale sprinted past him—his chains snared a tentacle, broke it off at one of its segmented seams, and lava blood seeped from the wound.