by Jim C. Hines
“Oh, shit.” I spoke four languages, but sometimes good old-fashioned swearing worked best.
Johannes Gutenberg had invented the practice of libriomancy around the end of the fifteenth century. Growing up, he had studied under a minor sorcerer and friar at St. Christopher’s church in Mainz, but Gutenberg had lacked the raw power of the great mages. He ended his apprenticeship and set out on his own, determined to master the art he had seen.
He devoted his life to the study of magic, a pursuit that eventually led him to the development of the printing press and the mass production of books. Gutenberg theorized that this would allow him to tap into the mutual belief of readers, bolstering his power.
His long gamble paid off. Hundreds, even thousands of people could now read the exact same book in the exact same form. The first recorded act of libriomancy was when Gutenberg used his mass-produced Bible to create the Holy Grail, the cup of life which had kept him alive all these years.
“Not a single automaton has responded to the attacks against the Porters,” Deb said. “We can’t find them, and we can’t find Gutenberg.”
Gutenberg had built the first automaton to be his personal bodyguard and protector around the end of the fifteenth century. Over the next forty years, as libriomancy spread and Gutenberg’s power grew, he created a total of twelve mechanical guardians. They were all but indestructible, tasked with preventing practitioners from abusing their power and helping to hide magic from public view.
I would have given anything to be able to study them, to learn how a libriomancer had produced such things. Nobody had ever managed to duplicate his creations.
“You think the vampires took him?” asked Lena.
“If they’ve turned him . . .” I swallowed hard at the thought of so much knowledge in the hands of the undead.
“Pallas doesn’t think so,” said Deb. “She says there are spells in place, contingencies from ages ago. None of those have been activated.”
“The vampires at the library couldn’t even stop the two of us,” Lena added. “How could they overpower Gutenberg?”
“They couldn’t,” said Deb. “Not without help.”
“You mean someone inside the Porters.” I waited, but she simply watched me, her head tilted to one side like a teacher waiting impatiently for a student to figure out the lesson. “Wait, is that why I wasn’t told? Was I a suspect?”
“We all were.” Deb reached into her jacket, then made a face. “Weeks like this, what I want more than anything else is a damned cigarette.”
“No way,” I said automatically. “I heard what you were like the last time you quit.” Magic and nicotine withdrawal made for a very nasty libriomancer. If the rumors were true, Deb had used a copy of The Odyssey to transform one particularly unpleasant patron into a pig for most of a day.
“The vampire population has doubled in the past ten years,” said Deb. “Not to mention werewolves and ghosts and the rest. They stay out of sight, but Gutenberg is losing control.” She stood and started toward the bookshelves, but caught her foot. I moved to catch her as she fell. She spun, and something hissed against the side of my neck.
“Sorry, Isaac.” Deb backed away, holding a high-tech hypospray in her hand.
Lena stepped between us, slapping the hypospray away. With her other hand, she seized Deb by the jacket and slammed her into the shelves, hard enough that books toppled to the ground.
“Easy on the library,” I protested. Warmth spread from my neck down into my chest, but for some reason, I wasn’t upset. “What was that stuff?”
“Truth serum.” Deb didn’t move. I wouldn’t have either, given how pissed off Lena looked. “I read about it in your reports. Bujold, I think.”
That would explain my laid-back reaction. Bujold wrote good truth drugs. “You should read the whole series. I’ll get you into spaceships and aliens yet.”
“Is the drug dangerous?” Lena asked.
“Nah.” I shook my head. “As long as I’m not allergic. It just makes the recipient feel content and helpful and uninhibited. And also warm.” Truth be told, this was the most relaxed I had been since the attack. I wagged a finger at Deb. “Three vampires tried to kill me, and you’re worried I’m the bad guy?”
“You’re an ex-libriomancer, yanked out of the field and banished to the middle of nowhere,” Deb said. “You kept a magical pet in defiance of Porter rules, and now you’ve acquired a dryad bodyguard. What would you think, hon?”
“I had to keep Smudge. How do you put a spider back into a book when the spider can set the book on fire?” More importantly, returning Smudge to his book would dissolve him back into magical energy, essentially killing him.
She tilted her head, acknowledging the point. “Do you know where Johannes Gutenberg is?”
“Nope.” I smirked. “I hear rumors he’s gone missing, though.”
“Are you satisfied?” demanded Lena.
“I’ll be satisfied once I get my hands on whoever’s killing my friends,” Deb shot back. “Isaac, I went to the MSU library with another Porter. The place was smashed, like someone had physically torn down the walls. The kind of damage an automaton could have done.”
And nobody but Gutenberg could command an automaton to do such a thing. “That’s crazy. Why would he attack his own archive?”
“Hell if I know. Pallas agrees with you. She believes it could also have been caused by a Porter who couldn’t control his or her magic.” She gave me a pointed look. “When you fought those vampires yesterday afternoon, did you have any problems?”
“You mean did I lose control and blow up half the building?” I shook my head. “Not this time.”
A moth tapped against the sliding glass door, drawn to the light. Deb stared for several moments, searching the darkness before turning her attention back to me. The fingers of her right hand fidgeted against her leg. “If someone were recruiting, you’d be the perfect choice. Resentful, eager to get back in the game . . .”
“Oh, sure,” I said easily. “I’ve got access to the Porter database, too. But resentment isn’t going to launch me into a sociopathic killing spree.” I sighed. “You and I both know they made the right call.”
I couldn’t have admitted it without the drug, but Doctor Shah had been right to recommend I be pulled from the field, and Pallas had been right to act on that recommendation. I had anger and resentment aplenty, but most of that was directed toward myself.
“What happened?” Lena asked quietly.
“I broke the rules.” My chest felt like someone had hollowed it out with an ice cream scoop. “I was putting in my time in the field, hoping to earn a research position. I’d been tracking a drug called Iced Z. Powdered zombie brains. Nasty stuff. You do not want to be anywhere near a Z addict when he gets the munchies.
“Two victims had shown up in the medical center out on Mackinac Island. The doctors didn’t know what to do with them. They thought it was some kind of antibiotic-resistant Necrotizing fasciitis. Flesh-eating bacteria. The first victim died of an overdose. We snuck in so Smudge could cremate her before the body rose again. I managed to save the second one, though she lost about twenty percent of her brain function. She was coherent enough to tell me where she got the stuff.”
I had never talked about what happened that day to anyone except Doctor Shah, but the magical drug coursing through my blood had loosened the floodgates. “They were using the horses. Automobiles aren’t allowed on Mackinac Island, so it’s all bikes and horse-drawn carriages. The dealer had set up an entire stable of undead horses behind this beautiful Victorian mansion down by the port. He’d been selling this shit to tourists for about two months.
“As I snuck inside, I couldn’t stop thinking about the girl we’d cremated. Her brainwave activity had never truly stopped; if the hospital had hooked her up to the right equipment, they would have picked it up, but there was no reason. When I found her, she was deep in some kind of undead hibernation while her tissues died and reanimated
. I kept wondering if she had felt the flames consuming her flesh. If her brain had been capable of registering the pain.”
I sighed. “In my head, I was that girl’s avenging angel, punishing those who had wronged her. I played the hero, and I did everything wrong. I had pushed myself thirty-six hours straight without sleep or food, running on righteous anger and stimulant tablets from a science fiction novel. I didn’t bother to properly learn the layout and routine of the house. I went in alone, too impatient to wait for backup. And I used magic with abandon.
“I remember the sound of bullets ricocheting from my personal shield. I fired stunners with both hands, shooting anything that moved. But those weapons only worked on the living, and this bastard had a cadre of undead bodyguards as well. Someone wrenched the pistol out of my right hand. I broke free and backed off, setting the remaining weapon to overload and throwing it like a grenade. I grabbed another book, but there was no time to read. The horses had broken free.
“Or maybe the dealer had deliberately set them loose in order to cover his escape, I don’t know. I heard their low, wheezing gasps, like tattered bellows blowing foul, rotten air. Decaying hooves clopped against the road as others smashed their way out of the stables. Four of them closed in on me. They shied back from Smudge, who was flaming like a tiny sun, but he couldn’t stop them all.”
“What did you do?” asked Deb.
“What do you think I did? I panicked! I tried to shove free, but the horses were too massive. I remember teeth clamping down on my jacket, yanking me off-balance. My shield would stop projectile weapons, but it was useless against zombies.”
I had tumbled to the floor, landing amidst soiled straw and blood and maggots. The sight of those unstoppable horses closing in on their long, bony legs had made me think of H. G. Wells. “Do you remember the Martian tripods from War of the Worlds?”
Deb nodded.
“As I lay there, I could see the pages of the book. I remembered the hopelessness and despair I felt the first time I read the story. I could feel the story, as if I was reliving that night at home, huddled by the light to read just one more chapter.
“Another horse bent down to bite my face. I pressed my hand to its neck and fired a beam of heat that burned through the horse and seared a hole in the wall behind. The same heat ray the Martians used.”
“Holy shit.” Deb stared. “Libriomancy without the book?”
“It almost killed me.” I glanced at my hands. “Humans char, too.” I shuddered, remembering the numbness in my arms, the blackened skin that had taken months to heal. “I destroyed everything. The horses, the zombies, the dealer . . . I would have died if the fire department hadn’t dragged me out of there. The next thing I remember, I was waking up in a magically warded prison cell.”
Lena reached over to give my hand a quick squeeze. “You stopped that man.”
“I got lucky,” I said. “I ignored the rules. I punched through the boundaries between myself and my magic until it almost consumed me. I could have destroyed half the island.”
“What was the last contact you had with the Porters?” Deb asked.
“An e-mail from Ray about a week ago, confirming that he had received my latest batch of books to be magically sealed and asking if I caught the Firefly marathon on Saturday.” My head was starting to throb. I didn’t remember Bujold describing headaches when she wrote about this drug, but it had been a while since I read her stuff.
Deb turned to Lena. “And how did you end up here, just in time to rescue Isaac from these vampires?”
“He was the closest Porter I thought I could trust,” Lena said, a little too quickly. “I came to his house first, figuring it would be better to talk privately. A sparkler showed up looking for him.”
I yelped. “They came here?”
“Only one. He got a lot more cooperative after I cut off his right hand. He said the others were planning to jump Isaac at the library.”
“What did you do to the sparkler?” Deb asked.
“I sent him home.”
“You let him go?” I demanded. “How do you know he won’t come back?”
Lena smiled innocently. “Because I said if I saw him again, I’d use his hand for fertilizer, but if he went away like a good boy, I’d mail it to him later this week. Which reminds me, there’s a vampire hand in your freezer’s ice maker.” Seeing my aghast expression, she added, “Don’t worry. I double-bagged it.”
“This is not how I used to fantasize about you showing up on my doorstep,” I protested.
Lena’s brows rose.
“Relaxed inhibitions,” Deb reminded her.
“Yep.” Which I suspected I would regret later, but at the moment I couldn’t bring myself to care. “I always imagined you as the outdoors type, and the two of us rolling around in the grass together. Maybe in the rain. Definitely barefoot, though.”
“Or taking a rowboat out after hours and making love on the river?” Lena suggested. To Deb’s exasperated look, she said, “What? I work part time for Parks and Recreation. I’ve got the keys to the boat sheds.”
“That would be good, too,” I said, shifting position. “See, it’s that kind of talk that explains why men used to go wild over nymphs.”
Her lips quirked. “Not just men.”
“Ooh. Now that’s just the kind of information that would have spiced up those fantasies.”
Deb gave me a gentle smack on the arm, pulling my attention back to the immediate crisis. “I’m sorry, hon. I didn’t believe you could be involved, but I had to be certain.”
“I understand.” I’d probably be pissed later, but for now I didn’t care. “I’m curious, what were you going to do if it turned out I was working for the bad guys?” I peeked at her jacket, trying to see what books she might have hidden away.
She swatted me back. “Be grateful you’ll never know.” She tensed suddenly, her attention focused past me to a yellow cricket the size of a small paper clip that had jumped into the room from the kitchen.
I stooped to grab the cricket, but it hopped away. “They’re for Smudge. I keep them in a screen-covered bucket in the office, but occasionally one sneaks out.”
“Sure,” Deb said, her muscles tight. She tracked the cricket’s motion as it retreated beneath one of the bookshelves. “I need help, Isaac. Someone I can trust. I’m officially reassigning you back to the field.”
The words were a sucker punch to the gut, smashing through my drug-induced high to steal the breath from my lungs. Hope, fear, and excitement duked it out behind my rib cage. Under normal circumstances, only the Regional Masters could reassign someone, but with Gutenberg gone and the Porters in a state of crisis, this would fall under a field agent’s emergency powers. Barely. “What about Lena?”
“Hm?” Deb wrenched her attention back to the two of us. “I can’t do anything for her officially, but you took out four vampires between the pair of you. That’s good enough for me. If you vouch for her, I want her along, too.”
Uncomfortable as I was with fieldwork, this could put me back on the path toward magical research. With one simple sentence, Deb had rekindled a dream two years dead. Pallas would have to sign off on everything, but if we could stop these attacks on the Porters, how could she refuse?
If I could stay focused. If I kept from losing control of my magic this time.
I pulled Deb into a hug. Her surprised squawk relaxed into laughter, and she pushed me away, grinning.
“I’ll be right back,” I said, rubbing my temples. “I’m going to take something for this headache, and then we can get out of here.”
I hurried back to the office. Whatever her drug had done to me, it was definitely getting worse. The light sent needles into my brain, and every beat of my pulse was a tiny explosion in the front of my skull. I grabbed a copy of Homer’s Odyssey and flipped to book ten, where Odysseus conversed with his great-grandfather Hermes.
“There you are,” I muttered, skimming the text. The virtue of the herb
that I shall give you will prevent her spells from working.
The herb was called Moly, described as “a talisman against every sort of mischief.” I had once written a paper about its nullifying effects on magic. Unfortunately, nobody had yet found a way to preserve its potency. Drying the herb merely resulted in a rather pungent and magically useless potpourri. But if I could earn a research position, I could look into alternate means of preservation, perhaps pressing and freeze-drying the plant, or saturating it in a glycerin solution. . . .
I checked the pages to make sure they were clean of char. Excitement and pain interfered with my concentration. It took close to a minute to finally reach into the book and grasp the herb, a small black-rooted plant with a round flower, the five petals so white they appeared bleached.
As I held it in my hand, the throbbing in my skull eased, and my head began to clear. The petals wilted as the Moly’s magic fought off Deb’s drug. I blinked and rubbed my eyes, then checked the book again. The pages were clean, so I dissolved the expended Moly back into the pages, clapped the book shut and returned it to the shelf.
With my mind working once more, my eagerness grew . . . and that made me nervous. It was exactly that excitement and determination, the thrill of magic and the need to charge out and avenge the fallen, that had gotten me into trouble before.
“Everything okay back there?” Deb called.
“I’ll be out in a sec.” My face grew hot as I recalled the things I had said to Lena. I glanced back at the office shelves. I had a hundred-year-old copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and a sip from the River Lethe would effectively erase her memory of my oversharing. Or maybe I’d be better off drinking it myself.
I banished that thought and headed to the bedroom to retrieve Smudge, who was racing back and forth, kicking up gravel as he went. The air above his cage was noticeably warmer. “What’s wrong, partner?”
One of these days, someone would write about a magical ring that allowed the wearer to read the mind of a fire-spider. Until then, I was stuck with vague warnings. I opened the blinds and checked outside: nothing. “Deb, is there any chance you could have been followed?”