by Jim C. Hines
My body felt numb and heavy. I tried to flex my hands, but there was no way of telling whether I succeeded. I hesitated, but if I tried to escape now, I’d have accomplished nothing. I tried to relax, to calm my thoughts, even as more figures shuffled toward me.
In the real world, thousands of copies of Rabid were spread across the globe; magically speaking, every one of those copies coexisted here. But only one of those books had been used recently to manipulate magic. I searched for any lingering trace of magic, trying to let the current guide me.
Pain returned. I welcomed it. This was the first physical sensation I had felt since losing myself in the book. The shattered lock cut deeper this time, and I could see the text more clearly, both the Latin, laid out in neat blocks and rows, and a second spell made up of broken scrawls, all but illegible.
Both the lock and that second spell had been placed upon the physical copy of the book I was looking for. I clung to them, letting the pain flow through me as I reached out to touch that physical book.
Darkness. Cold air that smelled like oil and gasoline. The heavy, dead magic of locked books. This wasn’t from my copy of Rabid; I was sensing wherever that other book was being kept.
My mind leaped at the implications. Could two libriomancers communicate this way? Could messages be passed through matching books? If so, would there be a delay, or would the process be instantaneous? What about physical objects? Could I transport something from one book to another?
A new voice caught my attention, not a character from the book but a man arguing with himself. He spoke in sharp, angry sentences that jumped and fell in volume like a broken radio. I tried to see, and was rewarded with the image of a vague, manlike shape. I had to concentrate to fill in each detail. He was white. Slender, wearing a filthy coverall and heavy boots. A jagged scar ripped the side of his head and face.
“You think I don’t hear you?” He grabbed a handful of books, snarled, and threw them aside with a careless disregard that made me cringe. No true libriomancer would treat books so harshly. “Always watching. Always spying. Ripping out the pages of my brain.”
This wasn’t Johannes Gutenberg. The voice was unfamiliar. I couldn’t yet focus well enough to identify the speaker.
His fingers closed around Rabid, and his tone shifted, becoming deeper. “I see you, Isaac.”
My mind ran at a manic pace. This is awesome I’m talking to someone through a book oh shit he’s going to kill me how the hell do I get out of here?
He muttered in Latin, and I saw his words, like hastily scrawled ropes shooting outward. He was trying to lock the book again, with me inside.
“Who are you?” I demanded, projecting the question with everything I had.
He hesitated, and I heard . . . I felt different voices trying to respond. James Moriarty. Jakob Hoffman. Doctor Hannibal Lecter. Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Norman Bates.
There were more, but the original voice shouted them down, struggling to make himself heard. More Latin snaked toward me. He grabbed a pen, scribbling the words onto the pages as he spoke.
I fled, seeking the magic of the story. If I could follow the killer’s magical current to him, I should be able to follow whatever trail I had left for myself when I reached into the book. But before I could find it, another presence crashed into me from below.
I screamed, only to have my fear devoured and spilled back over me, increased a thousandfold. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think. I clung to myself as that tide dragged away everything I was. Memories, dreams, everything crumbled like a sand castle on the beach.
“Isaac!”
The syllables meant nothing, but I reached out instinctively, like an infant grabbing for his mother.
My eyes snapped open. My brain rebelled as it tried to reorient to a physical world of light and matter. My throat was hoarse. Lena sat beside me, shaking my shoulders and shouting, but I couldn’t hear her over my own screaming. My vision faded, and I felt myself topple sideways.
Strong hands caught me, easing me down. My body was rigid, muscles cramping in pain, but I couldn’t relax. I could feel that other presence following me through the book. I didn’t know what he had sent after me, or how. All I knew was that I had to get away; I had to stop it from following.
My hands were empty. Where was the book?
There, discarded on the ground. Smudge stood to one side, covered in orange fire. I pointed and screamed something I never would have imagined myself saying. “Burn it!”
Smudge couldn’t understand English, but he was perfectly fluent in terror. He raced to the book and jumped onto the cover, turning and dancing and igniting the pages.
“Isaac, look at me!” Lena cradled my face, her eyes wide as she searched mine. “What happened?”
I shuddered. Sobs ripped through me. I clung to her, trying to shut out the memory of being consumed, of the inhuman rage and hatred that would have drowned me.
She held me, one hand combing through my hair. “You’re safe,” she whispered, over and over.
I shook my head and closed my eyes. I don’t know how long I might have stayed there if I hadn’t sensed the magic leaking from the book, brushing my bones. I yelled and jumped to my feet.
Smudge scurried toward us, leaving blackened weeds in his wake. Behind him, burnt pages fluttered in an unseen breeze: pages damaged both by fire and by magical char.
Lena grabbed her bokken, raising them both in a defensive stance. “Tell me what happened, Isaac.”
“I found him.” The words hurt my throat. “He tried to trap me in the book.”
Only whatever that last attack had been, it hadn’t felt like a magical lock. It was more like . . . hunger. Desperate, furious, raw hunger. The memory started me trembling again. I doubled over and grabbed my knees, squeezing hard so the pain would prove I was still real. That I still existed.
“Isaac . . .” Lena shifted sideways. “What is that?”
The book’s movement grew more violent. Pages tore loose, whirling about in tight circles. “I think he sent someone . . . something . . . to follow me.”
Lena snatched at one of the pages, then swore. Blood welled from her fingertips. She moved to stand between me and the book.
None of this should have been possible. Peering through books was one thing, but physically reaching through that book to strike another libriomancer? Gray smoke whirled within the pages, coalescing into solid form. This could change everything we knew about libriomancy, and all I wanted to do was flee.
I forced myself to stand. Characters shouted in my head, their words as loud and real as Lena’s, thanks to my immersion in the book.
Smudge scrambled up the closest wall, burning like a beacon. This was the sort of threat Gutenberg’s automatons had been created to fight. They could absorb magic, devour whatever this thing was and destroy the book in the process. I, on the other hand, was close to losing myself to my own magic.
Smoke and blackness began to coalesce. I could feel the thing pushing, struggling to find form. Arms and legs separated from the smoke. A man-shaped shadow took a slow, shuddering step toward us. The whirling pages clung to its body, a blackened paper skin. “I think . . . I think it’s a character from the book.”
“Which one?”
I listened to the voices as the thing took another step. “All of them.”
The figure didn’t seem to care about the various laws of magic its existence violated as it trudged toward us, propelled by the one drive every character in the book shared: the need to destroy their enemies.
Chapter 13
I STOOD FROZEN AS THE THING APPROACHED.
I had faced monsters before. I had my books, my magic . . . if I could shut out the voices long enough to use them. But I didn’t know what we were fighting. It looked like nothing so much as a burnt corpse. There was no face, nothing but faint impressions that could have been eyes and a mouth. I couldn’t even figure out what to call it.
Lena’s swords flattened in her hands. I co
uld feel the wood responding to her magic, like a low, warm buzz through my bones as the edges grew sharper.
I shouldn’t have been able to feel it. That was another warning sign. The boundaries between me and magic were dangerously thin.
“Is that thing contagious?” Lena asked.
I hadn’t even considered whether it would carry the virus. “Possibly.”
“No offense, but I don’t like Plan B anymore.” Lena slid one foot forward and swung.
Her bokken hit the thing’s neck and snapped like a rotten branch. The impact knocked the creature back a step, but didn’t appear to have injured it. Lena stared at her broken weapon.
Georgia McCain was the protagonist of the book. If this was a conglomeration of characters, she should be the strongest. “Georgia, I know you’re in there. Can you hear me?”
It snatched up the other piece of her sword and began to gnaw on it, doglike.
“She’s feeding on magic,” I said. Meaning any weapons I might be able to conjure would be worse than useless. Blasting the thing with a disruptor beam would only make it stronger. I glanced at Smudge, who was staying safely out of the way. But if this got worse, he would try to help. He had to. It was how he was written. And he would be nothing but a bite-sized snack to this thing.
Lena tossed her swords aside, scooped up a brick, and threw. It tore an ugly wound through Georgia’s shoulder. Paper skin flapped loosely, but the damage healed within seconds. Lena made a face and retreated toward a broken section of wall, where she ripped out a six-foot length of rusted rebar and gave it a quick spin with both hands. Bits of concrete clung to one end of the bar.
I backed away as whatever it was lurched toward me. Lena strode up to it and swung her metal staff like a baseball bat. The impact flattened the thing’s head and knocked it to the ground, but it merely groaned and pushed itself to its knees. Lena smashed it back down, spinning her staff to batter it about the head and limbs. “Join in any time.”
I tried to remember the calming exercises Doctor Shah had insisted on teaching me. I needed to focus, to think, but every time I looked at this thing, I saw only darkness returning to devour me.
Not just me. It would have to kill Lena to get to me. Smudge, too, unless I found a way to stop it.
The thing showed no sign of strategy or planning. As far as I could tell, it was simply going after the closest and strongest source of magic.
“It’s like fighting a piñata from Hell,” Lena said, breathing hard.
“He didn’t send something through the book,” I said slowly. “He reshaped the book itself.”
“Terrific. So how do we kill it?”
Smudge was a magical creature given physical form. You could hurt or kill him by destroying that form, but this was a book, a literal portal to magic. No matter what we did, it could re-form itself.
A part of me wondered at the limits of such magic. If we flung the damn thing into the sun, how long could it endure? As I had no convenient way of launching it into space, that was a dead end. I needed more time to study the damn thing.
Lena cried out and jumped back. Her pants leg was torn, and blood dripped down her ankle. “It’s cold!”
I pulled a cyberpunk book from my jacket. My fingers shook as I flipped to the dog-eared page I wanted. I hesitated. I had performed libriomancy a thousand times, but now I was afraid. I felt like a child again, terrified of the book and what lay beyond.
Rationally, I knew this book should be safe. Yet it took all of my willpower to force myself to reach into those pages.
Even as I tried, a girl’s voice condemned my recklessness: another character from Rabid, decrying the dangers of biological warfare.
I shouted to drown out the voices and plunged my hand deeper, grabbing a simple handle reminiscent of a sword hilt.
“I thought you said this thing fed on magic,” Lena said. Sweat shone on her face as she continued to strike.
“Lead it in here.” I ran through an open wall into the cool shade of what had once been an assembly line. Rust and graffiti covered the metal support pillars. A rat scurried through a gap in the far wall. Overhead, sparrows fluttered angrily from their nests in the steel rafters, protesting my intrusion.
They were going to be a lot more upset soon.
Lena smashed the thing to turn it around, then struck again, knocking it after me. She reminded me of a hockey player controlling the puck. Her jacket was torn, and her cheekbone was vivid red.
I pointed the handle away from me and activated it. A monofilament wire shot out, held in place by a powerful magnetic field which had probably fried every one of the credit cards in my wallet. I extended the blade to its maximum length and flicked my wrist. The pillar to my left shivered. Dust and flakes of old green paint rained down. The cut was invisible at first, but then the pillar shifted ever so slightly out of alignment. “Can you pin it to the floor?”
“Not for very long.” Lena landed an overhead blow that bent the creature double. Its hands grabbed Lena’s knee, and she yelled in pain. She brought her other knee into its jaw, but it clung tight. She had to jab the bar through the thing’s hand and pry the arm back to free herself.
It grabbed the other end of the bar, and Lena’s mouth tightened into a smile. She stepped back, yanking it off-balance, and speared the end of the bar through its chest.
Lena lifted the opposite end of the bar, then thrust downward. Steel punched through the old concrete floor. Lena bent the end of the bar double like an oversized staple through the thing’s chest, then jumped backward, collapsing to the floor as her leg gave out.
I swung at another pillar, then grabbed Lena’s arm. She did her best to keep up as I all but dragged her away.
The first pillar shifted and ripped free of the roof, showering metal and rust as it slammed to the ground with an impact that swayed the whole building, but the roof remained standing.
I cut through several more pillars from the doorway, then flicked off my weapon. “This would probably be a good time to get the hell out of here.”
What followed sounded like a drawn-out explosion. I stopped only long enough to grab Smudge as we hobbled away, taking shelter in an open doorway of the next building. The center of the ceiling collapsed first, steel and concrete and tarred roof crumbling inward. The ground shook, and dust shivered down from above.
I glanced around, wondering if I had miscalculated. None of these structures were terribly stable, and if they came down, I doubted we would be able to escape. Lena apparently had the same thought. She grabbed my arm and pulled me down, sheltering me with her body the best she could. She was tough enough to endure falling glass and debris, but if the whole place collapsed, we were both squashed.
Slowly, the cracking and rumbling quieted. Dust clouded the air like brown fog. It looked like about half of the building had fallen, and there was no sign of whatever the other libriomancer had sent after us.
Lena’s arm and leg were both bleeding. I wasn’t sure what would happen if she became infected. Her magic defined her; could a magical disease rewrite what she was? But the cold hum of the book’s magic was absent. I hoped and prayed that meant she was safe.
I started to dissolve my weapon back into the book. I stared at the pages, momentarily confused. I didn’t have time to read old novels, not with a potential Category A bioterrorism event. I should be back in the lab, not . . . what was this place?
“Isaac?” A heavyset woman touched my shoulder.
“What are you doing out here without a biosuit?” I started to back away, and the woman reached out to grab my arm. An electric shock jolted my nervous system.
No, not an electric shock; a magical one. Lena. This was an old auto plant in Detroit, not a quarantined lab in Phoenix. I staggered back, gasping for breath.
Lena caught my elbow. I slipped the book and handle into my pocket. Dissolving a magically-created object was simple enough, but right now I couldn’t risk it. “Sorry. Spaced out for a moment, that’s all.�
�
“Bullshit. What just happened?”
“Monofilament sword,” I said, deliberately misinterpreting the question. “Maximum length of twenty meters. Cuts through almost anything.”
“Isaac—”
“Later, once we’re safe.”
She glared, but didn’t press me. “You think that thing is still alive under there?”
“Yep.” I could feel it underneath the ruins, an open book leaking magic into our world. “That was the easy part.”
I started toward the source of that magic, but Lena grabbed my collar and hauled me backward. “Give it a minute to make sure the rest of the building isn’t about to come down. You can use the time to tell me who or what we’re up against.”
I fought the urge to flee, uncertain whether the impulse was my own or an artifact of the characters fighting to take hold in my head. “This isn’t Gutenberg’s work. I got his names. Some of them, at least.”
“How many do most libriomancers have?”
“Shah was right. He’s possessed. James Moriarty, from Sherlock Holmes. Hannibal Lecter, a serial killer from Thomas Harris’ books. Ernst Stavro Blofeld is a James Bond villain, and Norman Bates comes from Robert Bloch’s Psycho.”
“Lovely company.” Another chunk of the roof crashed down, making her whirl. She stood unmoving, attention fixed on the mess, before lowering her bokken. “Doesn’t anyone ever get possessed by Mary Poppins?”
“That wouldn’t help. The transition from the book would destroy the mind, and you’d end up with one mad nanny. But you’re right, possession tends to involve more aggressive minds.” I wondered who would be first to take up residence in my head if I kept pushing. “I heard one name I didn’t recognize: Jakob Hoffman. It might be the libriomancer’s true name, or it could have been another character. Either way, I’ve never heard of him.”
“All of them live inside his head?”
“Mad as hatters. And once possession takes hold, it becomes easier for other characters to sneak in. You become the doorway for the book’s magic.” Given what I had seen, it wouldn’t be long before that magic burned him out completely. The problem was the damage he could do in the meantime. “Whoever he is, he hated me.”