Bookburners

by Max Gladstone

  “Fine. The three of you.”

  “And my sister.”

  “No.”

  “I won’t go in without her. I don’t trust that man.”

  “You’d let the world die to protect yourself?”

  “As you keep reminding me: It’s not my world.” From up the street, a roar. “Decide. You don’t have much time left.”

  Shah said something short and sharp and probably untranslatable in a language Sal didn’t recognize. “Go, then. Menchú, you watch Asanti. The rest of us, to the line.” She led the way, and Soo followed her, and Liam.

  Ellsdale glared from Frances to Perry and back—or else that was the way he normally held his face. Fine. Sal didn’t want to thank Perry verbally, not with that guy watching, but she caught his hand, held it. They’d been chewed out by Mom and Dad enough times, together and separately, for that to be enough.

  Sal looked up, and Grace was there.

  God.

  She looked—never mind how she looked, silhouetted by that pink light, torn, strong, beautiful, fierce, but right now, in this moment at the foot of the bridge, sad, like a woman reaching out the window of a receding train. Looks did not matter (the curve of her cheek, the tooth visible between her lips, the way her fist tightened when she wanted to speak but the words she needed were words she could not say). Sal had never before known, with such certainty, how it must feel to be Grace: to know each breath she took she would never take again, each chance gone forever, to feel the seconds of her life rise in smoke and spiral to stain a painted ceiling and obscure the work of masters. They would all die—not now, maybe, if they were lucky, but someday. All of this, they would never have the chance to try again.

  And here, on this riverbank, there was no time.

  She had never visited this place inside her heart before.

  Fortunately, Grace had. She stepped in, and pulled Sal to her, and Sal returned the embrace. Before they parted, Grace whispered in her ear: Come back.

  Then she was gone to the line, and Sal and Perry and Ellsdale and Frances moved forward into magic.

  • • •

  Liam paced the line, nervous, sword in hand. Behind him, Sal and the team marched and rolled into the rift. Behind him, Asanti drew her circle, started her chant. Either Asanti’s work or Frances’s would draw monsters’ attention. Shah seemed to be everywhere, giving orders, helping the London cops with their new weapons and ammunition, sharing a joke with one of the Team One heavies. She wasn’t smoking, yet. Word from Team One was, you could tell Shah thought things were about to go tits up when she allowed herself a cigarette.

  There was Grace, up the line, testing one of the broadswords they’d brought from the Tower, a big nasty heavy thing made to be used from horseback. Liam thought he should join her—but she looked so complete, separate, steady, that he didn’t feel he should, or could, spoil that by asking her for help with his own creeping dread. Christ. He tested his grip on the sword. It felt light. He laughed, and thought the pitch was higher than he remembered.

  “What’s so funny?”

  That public school accent identified the speaker even before he turned. Soo offered him a stick of gum. Her wings rose folded from her back.

  “Peppermint?”

  “I don’t …” he said. Then, “Sure,” and bit in. The mint tasted weird; it tasted like a city that wasn’t burning.

  “You were laughing.”

  “Feels funny, if you must know, fighting on the same side as the London police. I’m used to trying to keep them from noticing I exist. Because of, you know.” He gestured at his face. “The Irish thing, and the international criminal thing.” She laughed, which he liked—he always had felt good when he made women laugh. “I’m just—a city falls down around you and you wonder what good you can do. I’m used to books. Problems that come out of them, that we stop before they get too big. I find problems and get the team there fast enough to stop them. Sometimes I hit stuff. But this!” He swept the sword before him. It sang through the air. That felt good, too—but he liked it less than he liked the feeling he got when he made women laugh.

  “It’s not so bad when you get used to it,” Soo said. “Here—you want to hold that closer to the guard, like—no, not like that. Let me.” She took his hand, and moved it on the sword hilt. “There. Keep the point out—you don’t need much strength with this, even against the things we tend to fight.” He tried again. “Yes.” The road lay before them, the bridge behind. “I like this part of the work. They never send us out against anything we’re not much smaller than. Except for Grace, that one time. But outside of that: It’s us against the world. We lose a lot. We die. We do good work. The Lord’s work—guarding His creation. Yes, the task is big. What task worth doing isn’t? And if I fall …” She shrugged. “I fall with no regrets.”

  Liam wondered what that felt like. The look on Soo’s face gave him some idea: like sunlight reflected off the moon.

  Then the ground split open, and a Tube train with a great fanged mouth and enormous skittering legs burst out, scattering cobblestones and terrified passengers everywhere.

  “No regrets, huh?” Liam said.

  “None at all.” Soo took wing.

  He raised his sword in the guard she’d shown him. “Let’s give it a try.”

  • • •

  Sal led them down.

  At first, the sky was merely a flat swirling pink, as if a dome closed them in, but as they walked it deepened, opening into an infinity of layers, and past them all, other cities—maybe reflections of London, maybe not reflections at all, maybe other cities, other worlds. Up there, in a sky that might have been a sea, great serpents coiled, and things like whales sang, and the clouds themselves had eyes.

  Ellsdale marched beside her, flexed his claws. His cold eyes darted, unwilling and unable to fix on anything in particular for too long.

  “Nervous?” she asked.

  “Determined,” he replied. His chains rustled. Sal wished Grace were here. “The farther in we go, the greater our risk of corruption.” Patterns in the concrete on which they walked shifted, like shadows of fish under ice.

  “Lighten up. I’ve been out here before, or to places that felt a lot like this, and I haven’t been corrupted yet.”

  Ellsdale’s expression suggested that he doubted Sal’s judgment on that point. No, wait—he was looking past her, toward Perry.

  “Ah. Perry?”

  “Yes?” The expression on his face: almost homecoming.

  “You’re glowing again.”

  Small dots of light moved beneath his skin—sparks, Sal thought at first, but no, softer, alive, like a jellyfish glow. “Isn’t it great?” He turned his hand over, flexed his fingers; the lights beneath his skin gathered and dispersed. “I have Aaron’s memories, but they’re foggy, and I never understood the corresponding sensation. This is so much different than I thought.”

  “Yes,” Frances said, but didn’t explain further.

  Ellsdale marched on, silent.

  “When we get in there,” Sal said, mostly to Ellsdale, “we want to fight as little as possible. Don’t irritate the rift.”

  “I will keep us safe,” Ellsdale said, “with minimal force.”

  They approached the light. Waves towered on all sides, always on the verge of crashing down. The bridge sloped toward the rift in the riverbed, but did not bend, as if space itself were curved. The slope grew, and grew; Sal found herself walking sideways. Ahead, the bridge’s descent became vertical, plummeting into the rift.

  She anchored a rope from her pack onto the bridge strut. “This’ll do for Perry and me. Ellsdale, you can get down on your own?” The knight nodded. “And I guess you could carry Frances?”

  Frances shook her head. Her expression had grown distant, drugged almost, as if attending to a conversation in another room that the rest of them could not hear. “I won’t be carried.”

  “Okay,” Sal said. She frowned, considering her rope and Frances’s chair. �
��This will be tricky. I guess we can tie you to the chair and lower you down? We might need to go back for more rope.”

  “You don’t understand.” Frances locked her chair’s brakes on and unwrapped the blanket from her legs. Ellsdale looked away; Sal didn’t. Maybe that was wrong—it felt respectful, but then, she was also curious.

  The tentacles Frances had instead of legs glistened in the reflected light of that impossible sky—and with their own, internal light, visible in the joins between scales. Frances uncoiled. Entranced by their sinuous unwinding, Sal didn’t notice the tension in Frances’s arms until she lurched forward out of the chair.

  And hovered.

  “What.”

  Frances’s legs explored the air—no, not the air, but something beneath it, something Sal could not feel, tasting it, tracing currents; Frances turned, and her legs unfurled like a skirt; she swooped up, and around, circled down, arms spread, rapturous. “Magic,” Frances said, “didn’t break me. It remade me. Fitted me for its own environment. I’m not native here—I can’t stay long and remain myself—but I can do this, for a while.”

  Perry looked at her in awe. He tried to jump—and landed hard on his Converse. “Ow. Stupid human body.”

  Frances held out her hands. “Here. I’m strong enough to carry you down.”

  “I’ll trust the rope,” Sal said, “thanks,” but Perry held out his hand, and Frances accepted him into the air.

  Ellsdale hooked his chains around a nearby post, and began to rappel without another word. Sal and Frances and Perry followed, into the rift, toward the dead spirit.

  • • •

  Even in the thickest of the fighting, Liam could see the battle was turning bad. They had made good progress at first: Team One’s fire line repelled the train beast, but not all the passengers flung from it were innocent bystanders. Some loped forward on hands and feet, jaws disjointing, skin pierced with spikes, and cleared the sandbag wall in single bounds. Soo kept up the pressure on the train, darting in with her spear, but the cops began to crumble. Grace worked the line, and Liam with her, carving, swinging, ignoring the blood that ran down his arm and his own creeping exhaustion. Deep breaths were the key to this sort of situation, even when, especially when, a yellow-fanged gorilla monster eight feet tall at the shoulder tried to bludgeon you to death with the top half of a policeman it had recently carved in two at the waist. Deep breaths; good, limber movement; balance. Patience.

  He took the thing’s arm off at the shoulder.

  As he fought, he prayed.

  When strength gave out, exhaustion flowed in. But even exhaustion failed, and after that came clarity. All of them on the line, working together: this blade rose and fell, he moved, he bled, he fought, together—good work, in company, was its own kind of prayer, a filling of the empty cup of him.

  Soo dove against the train again, pierced through its window into its beating metal heart, and the train crashed, writhing, to the street; oil blood sprayed everywhere, and took fire where it fell, a stench like melting fat. Soo wheeled away, but a leg struck her in the back, and she hit pavement, skidded; the crawlers tackled her, pulled her down.

  Liam disengaged, tried to vault the barricade. “Liam! No!” Grace’s voice—he stopped. Behind him, screams—he realized, too late, that the monster he’d been fighting had not tried to follow him, but torn past, loping through the camp, past Menchú, past Asanti, toward the rift.

  • • •

  The river spirit lay clenched in the rift in the world, its great head lolling down, crystal teeth bare, tongue trailing acid over the earth. Sal landed on the Thames riverbed, its dank mud baked solid by the press of magic, and sown now with ruby-red grass that hovered, bobbed, and waved, and cast strange images when struck with light.

  Sal didn’t look through the rift. The Tower Bridge ran straight down into the break, on both sides, and seemed set to stretch into forever. For all the chaos back in London, the riverbed was hushed, the air too thick for sound to move—the high-pressure quiet of nearing storms. Sal could hear her own footfalls, each distinct, and her breath, like she’d pressed her hands over her ears. The metal click as she disengaged from the rope. The whine of her own brain, working. Ellsdale dropped the last five feet in free fall, landed heavy as a missile; Perry stepped down. Frances did not. Her legs sculled the air.

  Frances and Perry set up in minutes that felt like hours. Sal hoped that was just nerves and adrenaline screwing with her sense of time—Liam and the gang couldn’t hold out that long up top. Frances drew diagrams in soil and space, Perry correcting her geometry calmly, and less often than Sal expected. Her brother had always been pedantic; Frances must have a better grasp on all this than Sal expected.

  She helped Ellsdale set the charges from his pack along the river spirit’s cooling, massive side, against its heavy scales that felt like a cross between glass and iron. Sal felt giddy when she approached the rift; she’d been almost a creature of magic, once, too. Done, they paced, on guard: she staring out to the riverbank, cast in rainbows by sunlight refracted through hanging water, and Ellsdale staring in, at Frances and Perry.

  “They’re on our side,” Sal told him. “Relax.”

  Ellsdale tapped his claws on his steel bracers. “If they get this wrong—or if you’re wrong to trust them—they’ll tear our world in half.”

  “So maybe we shouldn’t make them nervous.”

  “It’s time,” Frances said. “Silence, please.”

  Sal glared at Ellsdale, who, at least, stopped talking. Frances raised her hands, a conductor invoking, and the lines she’d drawn around herself in air and on the earth began to glow. She spoke a syllable that echoed through time. The earth quaked. The rift’s edges surged, and that strange foreign giddiness spiked.

  “Wait,” Sal said. “Did you hear that?”

  “Which?” Ellsdale asked. “The magic words or the earthquake?”

  Before she could answer, neither, the monster crashed to the earth between them.

  • • •

  “Here we go,” Asanti said.

  Father Menchú didn’t need the cue, but appreciated clarity. The light at the end of the bridge burned brighter than ever; the sky changed texture, and the far side of the Thames seemed farther away, and alien, a city of horned spires; ghostly creatures a thousand feet tall crept between the buildings, not quite there, not quite gone. Tornado Eaters, or their kin. “Do it.”

  “You don’t have to stick around for this part. I know it bothers you.”

  “It—No. Asanti.” Menchú reached for her, hesitated, then followed through, and set his hand on her arm. “We’ve had our differences. I was a fool. I lost your trust more times than I could count. But I’m standing beside you, now. What can I do to help?”

  She smiled, looked away, looked down. “Not much,” she admitted. “All I have to do is stand here and keep chanting—I’ve adjusted the summoning deal so that when I stop, the servants go home. But it’s good to know you’re here.”

  He drew back, and let her work.

  The light of magic blazed in the sky. Asanti clapped her hands, and spoke a word, and, easy as breathing, the circle she’d drawn before them was full.

  “Hello again,” the servant said. “What do you wish of me?”

  • • •

  The monster, bone-studded, slick with ichor and its own blood, went for Ellsdale first: tore into the knight, tackled him to the ground, prying at his armor with the claws of its right arm. Someone had already done them the favor of cutting off its left. Unfortunately, they hadn’t done anything about the teeth. Ellsdale’s chains caught the beast’s limbs, but its claws already pierced through Ellsdale’s chainmail, like a cat’s in a loose-knit sweater, and when Ellsdale tugged, the monster roared. Its jaw widened, a long slick tongue snaked out, and then those sharp teeth snapped shut on Ellsdale’s head, and pulled.

  The helmet straps gave way. The creature spit the twisted helmet out onto the red grass, snarled, and tried agai
n to bite his face off—and then its head exploded.

  Sal chambered another round. “Lucky,” she said. “Bullets don’t usually work on these things.” She heaved the corpse off Ellsdale, working the claws out of his armor.

  Ellsdale didn’t answer at first, which Sal put down, hopefully, to shock. When she turned to look, she saw.

  Frances burned, immense, in the air above the rift.

  Her hair rose about her, furious, lightning-flashed; the glow within her legs shimmered now through her whole body, sent forth brilliant beams from her eyes and throat; she had many arms, made of fire, and a third eye opened in her head. When she spoke the rift obeyed: quaking, widening with every syllable. Perry stared up at her in awe, though he, too, had changed, his light-motes swollen, blotchy, spinning now under his skin, woken whirlwinds.

  And glancing back, Sal read Ellsdale’s mind. No magic to that, just a detective’s eye, old habits, detail, instinct: you learn to spot fear, to anticipate the moment it gels to determination, into desperate action, the lunge, even under armed guard, for a weapon.

  Ellsdale saw Frances, barely human, widening the rift. He saw the madness beyond. And, full of adrenal terror, the stink of that monster’s mouth still fresh in his mind, he decided he could not let this happen.

  He sprang forward—too slow. Sal’s gun barrel clipped him on the back of the head, and he went down. That only worked so neatly in movies, though. She straddled his back, caught his neck, choked him until he went limp.

  “Sal!” Perry cried. “The body!”

  The rift was wide enough, now, wider still, the light it shed blinding, but the blast of magic kept the river spirit up. It hovered, limp, broken, bleeding, over the abyss.

  Sal grabbed the detonator from Ellsdale’s belt. Pressed the button. Explosives burst, and the body fell halfway through the rift, and stuck.

  The explosion had widened the rift. The river bottom drummed as if with a coming stampede. Frances screamed, doubled over in midair, too much power surging through her at once.