by Jim C. Hines
I checked my books, mentally reviewing which weapons would be best against a possessed libriomancer. The Odyssey was starting to show signs of char, but I should be able to get more Moly, and I needed to be able to counter whatever Hubert might throw at us. A stun grenade would be good if we could get the drop on him.
I thought back to what de Leon had said. Whatever Hubert had inside of him, it was enough to frighten one of the most powerful sorcerers in the world. If de Leon was nervous, my chances were pretty dismal. But if we could sneak in long enough to find and rescue Gutenberg . . .
Invisibility. Speed. Silence. We needed to be magic-enhanced ninjas. I picked out a few more titles, then looked over my books for healing magic. Possession couldn’t be cured, not once it had gone this far. There was nothing I could do to save whatever remained of Charles Hubert.
Lena rapped on the window. I yelled and dropped the books I had been studying. Okay, I needed some ninja magic. Lena seemed to be doing fine on her own.
“It’s abandoned,” Lena said as I climbed out of the car. “Looks like he left a while ago.”
“Dammit.” I lifted Smudge to my shoulder. He was hot to the touch. “Are you sure? This is not a happy spider.”
“The place is a wreck, Isaac. Nothing lives there now except maybe the raccoons.”
I gathered my books and followed her down the road. A short distance on, it branched to the left into an overgrown clearing beside a plain-looking wooden cabin. What was left of it, at any rate.
“Automatons?” asked Lena.
“Maybe.” Something had smashed its way into the cabin. Only two of the four walls remained. Half of the roof had splintered and fallen in, and the rest sagged dangerously. A wooden staircase on the far side led downhill toward a small stream.
The interior walls that remained were unfinished, and the floorboards were bare plywood. A flannel jacket hung from a peg on the wall. A set of shelves had collapsed, spilling canned food beside a rust-dotted refrigerator that looked to be at least forty years old. Torn, moldy books were strewn through the wreckage, along with something metallic.
I stepped closer, testing the floor. An ominous cracking made me back away. “Could I borrow a sword?”
Lena handed me one of her bokken. I used it to poke at the books, searching for the glint I had spied. After a few attempts, I uncovered a gold coin slightly larger than a quarter. I slid it close enough to pick up and brushed it off on my sleeve. Though worn, I could make out the image of a stern-looking woman and the words “Dei Gratina.”
“What is it?”
“A two-guinea coin.” I flipped it to Lena. “A piece of treasure from Treasure Island. It’s a training exercise. Ray had me create and dissolve that same coin time and again in our first year working together.” I stared at the ruined books. “Hubert was practicing.”
“You think the Porters noticed?”
“And sent an automaton to deal with him? Maybe.” I turned in a slow circle. A clear, grassy area the width of a two-lane road led down to the stream. On the other side of the clearing, a pair of pine trees had toppled over, the trunks splintered like matchsticks. Most of the needles had fallen off, forming a brown carpet on the ground.
“Hubert walked away from this,” said Lena. “So what happened to whoever or whatever attacked him?”
I took Heart of Stone from my jacket and pulled out the enchanted sunglasses I had used before. Beneath one of the fallen trees, the air rippled slightly, like a cloaking device from an old SF flick.
Smudge grew hotter as I approached. I heard the telltale puff as his body ignited, and leaned my head to the left to avoid singeing my ear. I pointed to the distortion. Lena readied her bokken and moved downhill, approaching from the other side.
Something clinked underfoot. I held up a hand for Lena to wait. I couldn’t see anything in the dirt or grass. I crouched, moving my hands slowly through the knee-high weeds until I found what I had stepped on: a pair of invisible metal blocks, each one the size of a small LEGO brick. Both were smooth on all but one side, where small ridges formed the letters I and W.
I clutched them in my fist and continued toward the magical distortion. Lena extended one of her bokken, giving whatever it was a gentle poke. “It’s heavy,” she said. “Feels like metal.”
Ponce de Leon would have yanked the concealment spell aside like a stage magician pulling a tablecloth from beneath a vase. I had to do it the hard way.
I went through six sprigs of Moly, setting them around whatever it was and watching each flower wilt and die as it leached away the magic hiding this thing from our sight.
I removed the sunglasses and hung them from a belt loop. Even without them, I could now make out a dark shape, larger and broader than a man. Smudge ran down my body, igniting dead pine needles as he scurried away. I stomped out the small flames he left behind. Smudge scrambled up an old beech tree, where he turned around and refused to come back down.
“That’s not a good sign.” I pulled out a blaster and aimed it at the shape, just to be safe.
I had always thought the dissolution of magic should have more pizzazz: swirling lights, colored smoke . . . even just a loud popping sound. Unfortunately, the universe didn’t share my taste in special effects. I saw the shine of metal, and then—
“Shit!” I scrambled back, tripping over fallen branches.
Sprawled before us, pinned face-up by a four-inch-wide branch that speared it to the earth, was one of Gutenberg’s automatons.
Chapter 17
FEW PEOPLE EVER SAW ONE OF Gutenberg’s mechanical enforcers. Far fewer walked away from the experience. I swallowed and stepped closer. A layer of dirt and pine needles blanketed the automaton, meaning it hadn’t moved in a while. The trunk of the fallen tree had rolled to one side, crushing the automaton’s left arm and leg into the dirt and leaving that single branch protruding from its chest.
The automaton looked like an eight-foot-tall tailor’s dummy, clad in silver armor made up of metal blocks fitted together so perfectly they appeared to be a single fluid layer. I unclenched my fist and looked at the blocks I had picked up. They matched the armor, and I could see where some of the blocks had been ripped away to expose dark, aged wood.
The head had been split like an apple to reveal the mechanism inside. Bronze gears and broken cables littered the ground between the halves. One eye had fallen loose, a perfect black marble the size of a plum.
I touched the right arm, half-expecting the automaton to come to life and grab me for daring to disturb its rest. When nothing happened, I swept off the worst of the dirt. A crack in the arm exposed the hammered metal joint of the elbow, and the wooden hand had been smashed, revealing smaller skeletal rods and hinges.
More metal blocks lay scattered in the dirt. I picked up another and scraped the dirt away to reveal a backward letter F.
“Movable type,” I whispered. These were what made up the automaton’s armor. Metal blocks, each one hand-cast and filed to perfection. Awe at what I was holding warred with intestine-knotting fear of the thing lying so close. Awe won. I was holding magical history. For all I knew, it had been Gutenberg himself who poured molten metal into the hand-molds to create these letters, though these were significantly larger than the pieces of type he had used for his printing press.
The blocks on the automaton faced inward, the letters stamping the wooden body. I crouched over the thing’s stomach, fear all but forgotten as I examined the exposed wood where the pine branch had staked the thing to the ground.
“Isaac, are you sure that’s smart?”
I barely heard. The wooden torso had been hand-carved; I could see the tool marks. The surface of the wood was a deep, oiled brown. I spat on my fingers and rubbed away the worst of the dirt. I could see the letters imprinted into the surface of the wood. “This thing is like a living printing press.” No, not just a press, but a living book. I sat back, trying to absorb what we had discovered.
Lena touched two fingers to t
he exposed wood.
“Be careful. It’s a construct, fueled by magic, and it retained enough power to conceal itself until my Moly drained that spell.”
“What could do this?” Lena gestured to the split head and the impaled chest.
“Charles Hubert. Meaning we are seriously outmatched.” A flicker of light pulled my attention toward Smudge, who had managed to set the side of his tree on fire. I grabbed a broken branch and extended it toward him until he climbed onto the end. Lena climbed up and beat out the flames with one hand.
I transferred Smudge to a bit of exposed rock and searched the woods to either side. “Keep an eye out. He might just be freaking out about the automaton, but if not . . .”
Lena flexed her shoulders and gave her swords a quick spin.
I slipped the sunglasses back on. The sprigs of Moly appeared as shadows, empty holes in the faint magic that flowed even now from the automaton.
This automaton was hundreds of years old, one of only twelve in existence, constructed with some of Gutenberg’s earliest spells. Never, to the best of my knowledge, had anyone managed to destroy an automaton. Though given what I had learned, maybe Gutenberg had raised an entire army of mechanical warriors, and that knowledge had simply been wiped from our histories.
Dissecting its magic could reveal how Gutenberg had animated these things; it could help me to understand the very foundation of libriomancy. But I trusted Smudge’s instincts. It was time to get out of here. Reluctantly, I turned away from the automaton and headed back toward the cabin.
“We should gather up those books to see what else Hubert was studying. If he found something with the power to stop an automaton, that might . . .”
My voice trailed off. One of the ruined books in what remained of the cabin was magically active. I pushed the sunglasses higher on the bridge of my nose, squinting at what appeared to be a rip in reality, edged in char. “Uh-oh.”
“Uh-oh as in this is going to be hard, or uh-oh as in we should be running away as fast as we can?” Lena joined me, swords ready.
“Do you remember how I tried to find Hubert, back in the auto factory in Detroit? I think Hubert has done something similar here.” I stepped onto the cabin floor, slowly shifting my weight forward until the boards bowed and cracked. Lena jabbed one bokken into the ground and crouched, touching the floorboards. The wood creaked as she used her magic. Through the glasses, I could see the plywood strengthening, the fibers knitting together.
I crawled forward to snatch the book. The cover was torn away, and exposure to the wind and rain had taken its toll, but the interior pages were still legible. The page header revealed this to be The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
“One of the characters in Hubert’s head comes from Holmes.” That couldn’t be a coincidence. Was possession the result of overusing this book, which was badly charred? Or did Moriarty’s connection to the text make it easier for Hubert to access its magic? There had been frustratingly few studies on the effects of possession on magic.
“Can you seal it?” Lena asked.
I grimaced. The safest way would be to access the book’s magic myself, then use that connection to close off whatever Hubert had done. It was the same strategy I had used to end Deb DeGeorge’s chlorine gas attack. Only Deb hadn’t been using a text so damaged it could fail catastrophically, unleashing God only knew what.
I peered over the top of my glasses. Even without them I could see the magical damage, like someone had held the book spine-first over an open flame. I wondered briefly if the connection worked both ways, if I could use this book to peek in on Hubert again.
With that thought came the memory of the last time, and the madness that had found me there. I shuddered.
“What is it?” asked Lena.
I tried to will my hands to stop shaking. “I can do this now, or I can do it safely. I can’t do both.” And I wasn’t all that sure about the “safely” part, even if I had a month to study.
A flash of light momentarily blinded me. I ripped off the glasses and rubbed tears from my eyes, trying to focus on the thing that had materialized in the woods on the far side of the cabin.
“They’re a lot more intimidating when they’re moving,” Lena said, raising both bokken and stepping in front of me.
An automaton stepped out of the woods like an oversized armored knight. Metal enclosed its body, all save the head and hands. Those glassy black eyes found us, and a jaw that made me think of a ventriloquist’s dummy opened slightly as it strode forward.
Even as we backed away, I found myself wondering if automatons were capable of speech, or if the mouth was just an aesthetic touch. Without a word, Lena and I split up. She retreated downhill, while I backed toward the car. I spotted Smudge in the edge of my vision, burning like a miniature sun on the stone where I had left him.
The automaton followed me. I snatched a book and read faster than I ever had in my life, snatching a laser pistol and firing before the barrel had fully cleared the text. I vaporized the corner of the book, and the red beam splattered against the automaton’s metal armor without doing the slightest damage.
“Just like the thing in Detroit?” Lena shouted.
“Looks that way.” Magic was useless against an automaton. I fled into the woods, hoping the trees would slow it down. No such luck. I glanced back to see wooden fists smashing trees aside like twigs.
A chunk of concrete the size of my head smashed into the automaton, exploding into a cloud of gray dust. The impact would have killed a human instantly, and even a vampire might have thought twice. The automaton merely staggered, then turned to face Lena.
She had stabbed her bokken into the cabin’s foundation and used them to pry off large, jagged blocks of concrete. She hurled another, and the automaton knocked it aside with one wooden fist.
I tossed the useless laser pistol away and switched to a David Weber book. Sweat dripped into my eyes, blurring my vision, and my entire body shook with fear and adrenaline. The pulse rifle I wanted barely fit through the pages. I dropped the book and hefted the rifle to my shoulder.
The automaton whirled again. The things were supposed to be able to sense magic. Every time I reached into a book, I was essentially shouting, “Come and get me!”
I sighted at the ground in front of the automaton and pulled the trigger. Tiny explosive darts spat from the barrel at supersonic speeds. The automaton’s foot sank into a smoking hole. I fired again, blasting the ground where it stood. Shooting this thing directly might not work, but maybe I could bury it long enough for us to escape. Clay and rock sizzled, and sparks shot through the smoke.
With another flash of light, the thing vanished from my makeshift pit and reappeared down by the stream.
“That’s cheating,” Lena complained.
I hurried toward her. “Get out of here. Take the Triumph, and contact Pallas. Tell the Porters what we’ve learned.” I blasted the ground again, trying to slow the automaton down.
“Right.” She grunted as she hurled another chunk of concrete. “Because the unstoppable clockwork golem will never catch up with a forty-year-old car lurching up a dirt road in first gear.”
I fired at a tree, hoping to topple it onto the automaton. Maybe that was what Hubert had done to destroy the other one. Explosive darts shredded the trunk, but the tree fell too slowly and at the wrong angle, missing by a good twenty feet.
Lena hit me in the shoulder with the butt of her weapon, hard enough to make me stagger. “Don’t do that again.”
“Sorry.” Right, no more shooting trees.
Lena raised her swords. “The hands and feet are exposed wood. If it would stay still long enough for me to grab hold, I might be able to destroy this thing from the inside.”
“Even if it wasn’t protected from magic, it would crush you the instant you tried.” Before I could say anything more, the automaton leaped forward.
Lena grabbed the back of my jacket and hurled me aside. She spun back to face it, raising one a
rm to block its swing.
I heard bone crack, followed by Lena’s shout of pain. This was a woman who had outmuscled vampires, and the automaton batted her aside like a rag doll. Her left arm was shattered, her sleeve torn and bloody.
“Lena, go!”
“I don’t think so.” She held her arm tight against her side as she pushed herself upright. She jumped back, dodging the next swing, but pain made her cry out again. She stumbled and grabbed a young birch tree for balance. “Besides, you’ve got the keys.”
“Dammit!” I switched books, this time pulling out a copy of Peter and Wendy. Just as before, my use of magic yanked the automaton’s attention back to me. I held the book over my head and shook it like a salt shaker. Fine dust sprinkled from the pages. I thought back to the kiss Lena and I had shared that morning, and fueled by fairy magic and happy thoughts, shot into the air like Superman. I tossed the car keys toward Lena, then spun in midair to face the automaton. “That’s right, catch me if you can!”
It could. There was another blink of light, and then it was high overhead, dropping toward me like a missile. I swore and swerved wildly, barely dodging the thick-fingered hand that clapped shut mere inches from my leg. Trees shook as the automaton crashed into the ground.
I was well above the treetops, which made both Lena and the automaton look like toys. If I fell from this height, it was an even bet whether I’d die when I impacted the ground, or if the tree branches would just batter me to a broken but breathing pulp. I curved to the side, my guts lurching like I was on the world’s worst roller coaster.
The automaton merely watched, its eyes glowing like tiny stars. The dust clinging to my hair and clothes began to sizzle, and I felt myself losing altitude.
“Not fair.” It was one thing to absorb magical attacks, but nobody had ever told me they could reach out and drain the magic from others. I dove toward the trees, trying to reach something solid. I stretched out my hands, reaching for a branch—