Libriomancer: (Magic Ex Libris Book 1)

by Jim C. Hines

  The last of the fairy dust dissolved. Lena shouted my name, though the air rushing past my ears made it hard to hear. The branch I had hoped to catch struck my palms like a baseball bat and tore out of my grasp. The impact spun my legs over my head, and another branch hit me in the back. Something sliced the side of my face. Wood cracked and split, and then the earth slammed into me.

  I tried to sit up, but a wave of pain and nausea crushed that idea. I could see the automaton striding toward me. Two of them, actually, though I assumed my doubled vision was a side effect of the impact. Blood pooled inside my cheek, along with a shard of something sharp that might have been part of a tooth.

  “Isaac!”

  I tried to wave Lena off, but my arm wouldn’t work. I looked down, and the sight of my dislocated shoulder made me queasy. I spat and looked up at the automaton. “I don’t suppose I could interest you in a bribe?”

  Wooden fingers reached for me, and then Lena hit the automaton with a tree. The force of her one-handed swing knocked the thing off its feet, a good six feet into the clearing.

  “Stay down,” she said as she limped past me. Her face was swollen and bloody. Her weapon was a five-inch-thick maple tree. She had sheared away the roots and branches, creating what was essentially an enormous wooden club.

  The automaton was already coming toward her. She shifted her grip, braced herself, and smashed the legs out from beneath it. The tree whooshed through the air overhead as she twirled and slammed the end down on the automaton’s face.

  “Lena, you can’t—”

  “Shut up, Isaac.” She swung again. The automaton blocked, and the tree cracked against its arm. The broken end fell away, and she stepped back, adjusting her grip. “I couldn’t save Nidhi. I’m not losing you.”

  I tried to stand, but the effort made me throw up. I had probably given myself a concussion with that landing.

  Lena thrust the broken tree like a sword. The automaton caught it in both hands and crushed it to splinters, then backhanded Lena into the woods, a blow that would have killed a human being instantly. I saw her push herself to her knees and prayed she would stay down.

  But she wouldn’t, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do to help her. The automaton turned back to me.

  We should have fled the moment I found that book . . . though once an automaton had your magical scent, they were supposed to be able to find you anywhere. I wondered briefly why Hubert hadn’t used them more often. Why bother with vampires when you had unstoppable mechanical soldiers?

  I saw Lena hobbling toward us again. I shook my head. “Get out of here!”

  “No.” She crouched at the base of a large maple tree and shoved her fingers into the dirt. A short distance away, roots punched out of the earth and coiled around the automaton’s feet.

  It ripped free without apparent effort and strode toward her. She swore and stood, back against the tree.

  “Over here,” I shouted, but it ignored me. Wooden hands reached for Lena’s throat.

  Her lips pressed into a tight smile. Her eyes met mine, and she blew me a quick kiss. With her good hand, she grabbed the automaton’s wrist.

  And then both Lena and the automaton fell backward into the tree.

  I could hardly move, let alone reach the tree where Lena had vanished. If my body hurt this much with adrenaline still pumping through me, I didn’t want to know what I would feel like later.

  I had left the Narnia book behind, not wanting to overuse its magic. I had swapped it for a gaming tie-in novel, one which came with potions of healing. Unfortunately, that novel was in one of my back pockets, meaning I had to sit up or roll over to reach it.

  I braced myself with my good arm and pushed onto my elbow. My eyes watered, and I cursed in three different languages until the pain receded enough for me to sit up the rest of the way. Sweat was dripping from my forehead by the time I managed to tug the bottom of the jacket out from beneath me.

  “Right,” I gasped. “From now on, the healing book goes in the front pocket.”

  I wiped my eyes and did my best to ignore the buzz of fictional minds reaching for mine as I thrust my hand into the book and plucked a healing potion from a halfling thief. I downed the entire thing, then gasped as my shoulder wrenched back into place.

  It wasn’t quite as effective as Lucy’s Narnian potion, but it fixed the worst of the damage. Cuts faded to red lines, and bruises dulled somewhat. Between crashing through branches on the way down, then landing on my books, my skin remained a mottled mess of black and blue. My tooth was still chipped, too.

  I was more worried about internal injuries. I pressed my abdomen, feeling for firmness and pain, but found nothing worse than bruises.

  Blackened weeds showed where Smudge had fled into the woods. I found him cowering in the dirt in a circle of charred pine needles. I waited for him to scramble back up to his customary spot on my shoulder, then turned to the tree where Lena had vanished.

  I pressed a sweaty palm to the tree. The bark was undamaged and cool to the touch. Their feet had dug deep into the dirt, gouging the earth. I could see where she had braced herself for that one final pull.

  So why hadn’t she emerged? I didn’t fully understand Lena’s magic, or the automaton’s for that matter. They could have both been killed, or they could still be battling within the tree. And if Lena lost that fight, could the automaton claw its way back into our world?

  I picked up the rifle and walked toward the cabin. I kept seeing Lena’s face right before she vanished: pain tightening the lines of her neck and jaw, eyes narrowed with determination. Again and again, I watched in my mind as the automaton beat the hell out of her. Her broken arm, her cries of pain ripping free even though she was obviously trying to hold them back.

  By the time I spied the discarded copy of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, I was too pissed off to think. I raised the rifle to my shoulder. “Let’s see if your little peephole works both ways, you son of a bitch.”

  I switched the rifle to full auto and pulled the trigger, emptying the magazine into the book in a mere four seconds.

  That might not have been the best move. Magical backlash surged through the gun like an electrical shock, flinging me backward. The rifle dissolved in my hands, leaving nothing but a coating of greasy black dust on my palms. I landed on my back hard enough to knock the wind from my lungs.

  Smudge skittered off my shoulder to the ground, flame rippling on his back as he turned around to glare at me accusingly.

  “Sorry about that.” I wiped my hands on my jeans and sat up. I had dug a smoking hole at least twenty feet deep and five feet wide. The book was gone. I retrieved my sunglasses. One lens was shattered, but the other worked well enough. I searched the hole, making sure no trace of magic remained.

  “Come on, Smudge.” The smart thing would be to get the hell out of here. If Lena hadn’t destroyed the automaton, if it managed to escape the tree, then at any moment I could find myself face-to-face with a mechanical nightmare, with no dryad bodyguard to save my ass this time around. Or Hubert could send another one after me.

  But Lena was in that tree, too. She hadn’t left me, and I’d be damned if I was going to abandon her.

  I gathered up every book I could find from the cabin and brought them to the tree. Back at my house, Lena had said she knew I was home because she sensed my arrival through the trees, meaning she retained some awareness of the outside world. I leaned against the trunk, wondering if she could feel my hands and forehead against the bark. “Thank you.”

  I sagged to the ground, surrendering to the aftermath of so much magic, but there was one precaution left to take. If the automaton won whatever battle it was waging within the tree, it would try to escape. I re-created the monofilament sword I had used in Detroit. The blade should cut through the tree as quickly as I could swing.

  I might not be able to use magical weapons against the automaton, but if it killed Lena, I’d slice the whole damn tree to pieces before I let i
t back into the world.

  I tried to concentrate on the books, sorting those that showed the worst signs of magical char. Those were the books Hubert had used the most. “What were you doing here?”

  Practicing, yes. But what else? He had come here, to a place that was quiet and familiar and safe. I thought back to the Copper River Library and the sparklers who had attacked me. Had magic come as naturally to Hubert as it had to me? Had he felt the same excitement, the same joy? Even as I had been certain I was about to die at the hands of those vampires, I had been grateful for the chance to use magic one last time.

  How much had he remembered? His anger toward the Porters suggested he knew what had been done to him. Gutenberg had taken away that part of his life once before. He would have wanted to find a way to protect himself. V-Day gave him a weapon, but books took time to write and publish.

  The Silver Cross wouldn’t be enough to overpower Gutenberg. Nor should it have worked on automatons, not if they were constructed to absorb magic. I flipped through the first book, an old copy of Dracula. Vampire research, perhaps.

  The next book was Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Harris. This was probably how Hannibal Lecter had crept into Hubert’s mind. I set it aside and reached for the next. The cover was gone, and the first few pages fell away when I opened them. I flipped to the middle of the book and froze. This was Albert Kapr’s biography of Johannes Gutenberg.

  We had assumed Hubert’s possession was an accident, a side effect of reckless magic use. We had assumed wrong. “You did it on purpose, didn’t you?”

  The automatons were built to protect their creator. To protect Gutenberg. So the best way to defend against them was to become Gutenberg.

  It wouldn’t have been perfect. The Gutenberg of this book was a creation of the author, a character built by historians. Transporting that character’s mind from the pages into our world would have resulted in a flawed, deranged copy of Gutenberg: a madman, but one who retained enough of Gutenberg’s identity to confuse the automatons.

  And then, once Hubert had opened himself to one book, removing the barriers between himself and the magic, other characters began to seep into his thoughts. Had any of those been deliberate? Had he welcomed Moriarty as a genius who could help him to stay one step ahead of the Porters?

  It was a desperate, brilliant move, one that would ultimately destroy him.

  I was so lost in the possibilities that I almost missed the movement from the tree. Alertness jolted through my nerves, and I grabbed the sword as slender brown fingers poked through the trunk.

  I waited, barely breathing, but the arm reaching toward me was unmistakably Lena’s. Wood and bark seemed to flow around her, flexible and fluid as the tree birthed her back into this world. I dropped the sword and stepped forward to catch her as she fell.

  For one horrible moment, I thought she was dead, her body expelled by the tree. And then her arms tightened around my shoulders.

  I lowered her to the ground, leaning her against the tree. She started to smile, then hissed and touched her swollen, bloody lip. “Remind me not to do that again.”

  “The automaton?”

  She wiped her chin. “He’s not coming back.”

  I snatched the gaming book and created another healing potion. The instant she swallowed, some of the tension began to ease from her body. The swelling on her face diminished, and the bones of her arm knit together with an audible crackling sound. “Thanks.”

  Smudge scrambled down my arm and jumped to the ground. I tensed, but he wasn’t setting anything on fire. He was simply creeping after a large, bright green luna moth that had fluttered onto another tree.

  “You destroyed one of Gutenberg’s automatons,” I said softly.

  Lena shrugged.

  “You’re not supposed to be able to do that.”

  “So noted.” She leaned into me, her head resting on my shoulder. “Tell you what. You take care of the next one, okay?”

  “Fair enough.” I put my arms around her, trying not to jostle her injuries.

  “You’re not going to break me, you know.” Amusement and more warmed her voice, and her breath brushed the skin beneath my jaw.

  “It was after me,” I said. “You didn’t have to—”

  “Actually, I did.”

  Of course. She couldn’t free Nidhi Shah without trading either Hubert or myself, and since we still hadn’t found Hubert . . . “We’ll get her back.”

  She pulled back, leaving her hands on my knees. “That’s not what I meant.” She lifted her head and looked me in the eyes. “I’ve never taken a beating like that before. I thought I was dying. But when I saw you fall . . . it wasn’t about saving Nidhi. I couldn’t let you die.”

  “Why?” The word escaped despite my best efforts. I had always had a problem with asking too many questions, even when I knew better. Especially when I knew better.

  Lena reached up to cup my face in her hand, her fingers brushing the hair back from my ear, and pulled me close. Her lips found mine, and for a moment I forgot about automatons and possessed libriomancers.

  She broke away. “It’s what I am.” Her attention slipped past me to Smudge, and her lips quirked. “To use a metaphor your spider might appreciate, nymphs can be quick to heat up, but once they do, they smolder for a long time.”

  I had no response to that, and Lena didn’t give me time to ponder. She stood and pulled me to my feet. “I’m thinking we might not want to hang around here.”

  “We can’t go quite yet.” I pointed to the broken automaton, trying to focus. “If it’s my turn to face the next one, I want to know exactly what makes these things tick.”

  Chapter 18

  I STOOD OVER THE AUTOMATON, an untrained coroner about to perform the world’s oddest autopsy. The trouble was, even “dead,” the automaton was all but invulnerable. Hubert might have been able to impale this thing, but so far I had failed to pry even a single metal block from its wooden body. Smudge watched warily from my shoulder. He had calmed enough to join me, but shifted to and fro, ready to flee at the slightest provocation.

  As eager as I was to uncover the automaton’s secrets, I couldn’t stop thinking about Lena.

  It had been one kiss, and a relatively brief one at that. We had fought an automaton and survived. Who wouldn’t get swept up in the relief and excitement after living through that? Whatever she might feel for me, it didn’t change the fact that she was in love with Nidhi Shah.

  But what happened to that love the longer she was separated from Shah? The more time she spent with me . . .?

  I turned away from that train of thought. Lena wasn’t a thing to be stolen. She had made her choice. She didn’t need me, not with Shah alive and human.

  Despite the past week, I knew so little about her power. The way she entered her tree reminded me of my own magic, of reaching into the pages of a story. The tree was her portal to magic. But how could Lena pass into and out of that magic at will? Did the tree absorb and hold her physical body? There was no way that tree had been large enough to contain both Lena and the automaton, suggesting their bodies somehow transformed, becoming a part of the tree.

  “What happened when you pulled the automaton in with you?” I asked. “How did you fight it? How do you know it won’t escape?”

  “It’s hard to describe,” she said. “It fought against me, and against the tree itself. As its strength waned, it tried to steal mine.” She touched the ground, as if reaching for the roots below to touch those memories. “That’s why it lost. It didn’t understand the tree’s magic.”

  “I don’t understand either.”

  “I didn’t fight it, Isaac.” She gestured toward the trees. “Do they fight the wind? Do they fight the snow and ice in winter? They endure. They live. They grow. Fire a bullet into the trunk, and it will heal, growing to encompass that bullet within itself. Chop off a branch, and the bark will seal the wound.”

  “Unless you chop the whole thing down,” I said.


  She glanced away. I wondered if she was remembering her own tree, killed by vampires. “The automaton tried to take my strength. I let it. The more I flowed through it, the more it became a part of us. A part of the tree.”

  “The bulk of the automaton’s body is wood,” I mused. That might have made it easier for Lena to absorb it into the tree. I tried again to pry the letters free from the broken body in front of us. “Can you soften this one enough for me to pull these loose?”

  Lena put her hand over mine. She grimaced when she touched the body, but the rigid splinters gradually bowed beneath our grasp. I wiggled one of the letters like a loose tooth, back and forth until it finally twisted free. More letters followed. I set each one down in order and studied the indentations in the wooden body.

  “Lux.” I checked the blocks to be sure. “Latin for light.”

  Lena pried more letters free from both sides of the word. Even with her magic, they clung hard. It took ten minutes to remove and reconstruct the rest of the sentence.

  “Dixitque Deus fiat lux et facta est lux,” I read. “And God said, ‘Be light made,’ and light was made.”

  “From the Bible?”

  “Genesis.” Latin text. I stared at the blocks, excitement prickling the back of my neck. “Pry off the next row. Hurry!”

  I stopped myself from reaching past her to try to rip the letters free, knowing it would be futile. I placed the letters together one by one while I waited, trying not to fidget. “Et magicae,” I whispered as more words formed.

  “Magic?” Lena asked.

  “Yes!” I flushed and lowered my voice. “Yes, that’s right.”

  She laughed, but pulled more letters free until I had laid out the entire sentence. “Et magicae artis adpositi erant derisus et sapientiae gloriae correptio cum contumelia.” I jumped up, laughing like a madman. “That’s the same spell Gutenberg used for his lock. I knew it sounded familiar.”