by Jim C. Hines
A new voice from the doorway said, “Whatever you choose, I suggest you choose quickly.”
Lena reacted before me, snatching up Excalibur and pointing it at the ghostly man standing behind us. The office was dimly lit, and the man’s form was unfocused, but both the voice and the magic emanating from his form identified him as well as a fingerprint.
“Aren’t you forbidden from leaving Spain?”
“Which is why I’ve not left. Physically.” Ponce de Leon chuckled and limped past us, passing through Lena’s sword like a ghost. He leafed idly through the books on the desk. His fingers never touched them, but the pages fluttered open in response to his power. “Charles Hubert is dead?”
“He killed himself,” said Lena.
“Did he, now? I wonder . . .” He clucked his tongue as he studied a copy of Rabid. “Clumsy work on these locks. Like he was trying to reshape the Venus de Milo with a chainsaw.”
He stepped toward Gutenberg. I raised my arm, but he merely chuckled. “I couldn’t hurt him if I wanted to. Not in this form, at any rate.” He reached out to brush spectral fingers through the hair on Gutenberg’s forehead. “Oh, Johannes. You knew this couldn’t last forever.”
“What couldn’t last?” asked Lena.
De Leon ignored the question. “You’re unhappy about the choices Gutenberg has made? You think someone else could do better?”
“You mean someone like you?” Lena asked.
De Leon raised his hands as if warding off an assault. “Chain myself with politics and bureaucracy again? Oh, God, no.” He looked up at me. “Isaac, on the other hand, shows potential. Magic is both art and science, and judging from what he’s done to himself here, he’s got a handle on both. I imagine, with a little work, he could figure out how to control the remaining automatons, and from there it’s a pretty straight road to the top spot.”
“I don’t even know how to free myself from this body,” I protested. “Could you—?”
“Even if I knew all of Gutenberg’s secrets, which I don’t, his geis on me prevents me from interfering in such matters.” He laughed, a tired, bitter sound. “I can’t help you, but neither can I protect him should you choose to end his life.”
“What would you do?”
He shook his head, his eyes going distant. “I’ve held power over people’s lives before. In time, I learned that I should not be trusted with such power. Whatever mistakes Gutenberg has made, I suspect I would have done far worse.”
“I don’t want to run the Porters.”
“Which makes you better qualified than many to do so,” de Leon countered.
He couldn’t be serious. I was a failed field agent, utterly unprepared to run a global network of magic-users. To make sure nonhuman races remained hidden from the public, and to enforce the peace between various races. To supervise my own people. To oversee the locking of potentially dangerous books.
“You’re unlikely to have another chance,” he continued.
“Why are you telling us this?” Lena asked. “Did you come here to persuade us to kill your rival for you?”
De Leon merely chuckled. “What I want is for you to consider the consequences of your choice, whatever choice you make.”
“How can we know that?” Gutenberg had chosen to allow the vampires to establish a nest in Detroit. As a result, a rogue vampire had murdered Charles Hubert’s brother. Gutenberg had locked Hubert’s mind and magic instead of imprisoning him. Years later, an explosion had shattered that lock, creating a murderer. Who could have foreseen any of that?
De Leon merely shrugged and examined another book.
All I had wanted was to be a researcher, to see how far magic could take us. To truly understand magic. “When Charles Hubert died, I saw the characters that had crept into his mind. I saw something else, too.”
“Something that frightened you,” said de Leon, nodding. “Something old and terrible and unstoppable.”
“Yes.”
“What you saw is the reason Gutenberg allows creatures such as vampires and werewolves to exist and multiply.”
“Why is that?” asked Lena.
“Because if that thing ever finds its way to our world, we will need their strength to defeat it.”
I thought of Hubert’s attack on the Detroit nest, and my meeting with Alice Granach. “Why would they help us?”
“Survival.” He stepped past me and looked down at Gutenberg. “Choose quickly, libriomancer. But whatever choice you make, be certain you’re prepared for what comes next.”
“What do you mean?”
He sighed. “Johannes is a brilliant, stubborn, prideful man. The Porters did their best to cover up his disappearance, but this night has destroyed their efforts. The world of magic will know what has happened. After all this time, we know that Gutenberg is vulnerable. There are those who would exploit such vulnerabilities.”
“Tell me what I saw in Hubert’s mind.”
He shook his head. “Only Gutenberg knows the truth.”
And if Gutenberg died, that truth went with him. If I wanted answers, I had to restore him.
Ponce de Leon’s mouth quirked, suggesting he knew exactly what I was thinking. Had that been his intent all along, to make sure I saved Gutenberg by reminding me how much knowledge would be lost if he died?
De Leon bent over the body and planted a soft kiss on Gutenberg’s lips. “Te amo, you old fool.”
I stared. Over the years, I had often wondered what would happen if Ponce de Leon and Johannes Gutenberg were to confront one another face-to-face. This had never come up as a possibility.
De Leon cupped Gutenberg’s cheek, then backed away. “Suerte, Isaac Vainio and Lena Greenwood.”
“Good luck to you, too,” I said automatically.
He walked through the desk and the wall beyond, disappearing like a ghost.
I turned my attention to Gutenberg. Whatever sins he had committed, he knew more of magic than anyone alive. If destroying a book was an act of evil, how much more evil was it to destroy a mind? I nodded to Lena.
She set her sword aside and peeled back the tape of Gutenberg’s IV. The flesh beneath was red and raw. Blood seeped from damaged skin. Lena tugged the needle free, and a single drop of dark blood trickled down his arm.
I reached out with my remaining arm, touching the magical web Hubert had woven to suppress Gutenberg’s power. With what remained of the automaton’s magic, I tore Hubert’s spell away like cobwebs.
Johannes Gutenberg bolted upright in the cot, blinked at Lena and myself, and vomited onto my legs. Lena grabbed his shoulder to steady him.
When he finished, his face was pale, and beads of sweat had broken out on his forehead. He wiped his lips on his sleeve. “I’m sorry about that. Thank you, Lena.” He nodded a greeting to her, then turned his full attention to me. “Isaac Vainio? What are you doing in my automaton?”
“How did you know?”
“You’ve inscribed yourself into the text, for those with the ability to read it. Also, the fire-spider gives you away.” He rose on shaky legs, leaning on Lena for support. “What of Charles Hubert?”
“Dead,” said Lena. “Consumed by magic.”
“A shame.” He combed his fingers through his hair, his movements becoming visibly stronger from one second to the next. I could see his magic at work, like antibodies devouring the remaining drugs in his system.
He brushed his hands over his wrinkled purple silk shirt and black trousers. His silver belt buckle gleamed like polished chrome. “Hubert was brilliant, but undisciplined. He used magic to protect the men in his unit ten years ago. He killed six enemy combatants. That . . . was not his first violation.”
“You punished him for protecting his own people?”
“For his methods in doing so,” Gutenberg said. “What would happen when those deaths became public, Isaac? The Porters are not an American organization, but a global one. We cannot afford to interfere in political conflicts. How long before national
interests would splinter us? Before we turned on one another in an ever-escalating war of magic?”
“Hubert sent the automatons to attack the Detroit nest of vampires,” said Lena. “Alice Granach is holding Nidhi Shah as a hostage.”
Gutenberg stepped toward the desk, examining the books. “There was an old text, bound in leather. I remember Hubert taking it from my library. Have you seen it?”
I knew exactly which book he meant, and I knew what must have happened to it. Only one other person had entered this office since Hubert’s death.
“I . . . don’t remember seeing a book like that.”
He studied me closely, then shrugged. “I’ll find it eventually.”
Somehow I doubted that.
Gutenberg grabbed another book from the desk. It opened in his hand. He glanced at the pages, then reached into the book to retrieve a small, black cell phone. “I assume Pallas is overseeing the conflict in Detroit?”
I nodded dumbly, trying to understand what I had just seen. Gutenberg hadn’t even looked at the cover or title before picking up that book. It was like he had known instinctively which one held the potential magic he wanted, and had opened the book to that exact page.
“Nothing.” He tossed the phone at the book. It vanished the instant it touched the cover. “They’re following standard containment practice. A single libriomancer uses a book to create an electromagnetic pulse to scramble radios and cameras. Unfortunately, such magic also plays havoc with communications.”
He gathered a handful of books from the desk, then marched out of the office and through the garage, stopping only briefly to survey the damaged automobiles in the parking lot. A Volkswagen Beetle growled to life and crept toward us. One headlight flipped upward, trying to blind us. The other pulsed with magic.
That second headlight was the piece that had come from Stephen King’s killer car. I braced myself. Hubert was dead, meaning the remaining cars were free of his control. My arms were useless, but I should be able to stomp these things into—
Gutenberg snapped his fingers, and flame exploded within the Beetle’s haunted headlight. The magical pseudolife within the car flickered out, and the engine died. Momentum carried the Beetle onward, but it was easy enough to intercept. The car crunched harmlessly into my leg.
Gutenberg spun in a slow circle, and magical fire blasted the cannibalized parts Hubert had welded to his other cars. I stared at him, trying to understand how a libriomancer could fling magic with such ease. For an instant, his body seemed to flicker. I saw not living flesh but text, skin made up of layer upon layer of pages, a palimpsest of books, magic, and humanity. At the same time, I felt Smudge fade. For that brief span as Gutenberg eliminated the last of Hubert’s guardians, Smudge was simply a spider, oversized and mundane.
Smudge was a manifestation of a book’s magic. Gutenberg had bypassed the book, stealing Smudge’s magic directly and using it to disable the cars. I felt simultaneously protective of Smudge and eager to figure out the trick myself. “What are you?”
“Sorry.” Gutenberg winked. “Trade secret.”
Smudge’s body exploded in fire as his magic returned, and he scrambled around to the back of my head, hiding from Gutenberg.
“I do appear to owe you both a favor, however.” He looked to Lena first, and nodded. “I know what you want, and I’ll do what I can to reunite you with your lover.” To me, he said, “What would you ask of me, Isaac Vainio?”
I stared down at myself. “This body—”
“Given enough time, I might be able to repair it. But returning you to what you were?” He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Though I rarely admit it these days, there are limits to my power. Your body has been destroyed, and libriomancy cannot create life. With the proper texts, I could perhaps construct a caricature of Isaac Vainio, but it would be a shallow thing, a mockery of the man you were. I am not God.”
This body lacked the physical reactions of my own, but despair hit me hard nonetheless. I felt emptiness, hope sinking away through my gut . . . phantom grief, perhaps, like the shadow pain of a patient with a lost limb. My prosthesis was a five-hundred-year-old creation of wood and brass and magic.
Lena folded her arms and studied me. “If you can’t get him out of there, then I guess I’ll just have to go in after him.”
“An automaton is no simple tree,” Gutenberg warned.
“Simple?” Lena laughed. “Have you ever studied the network of a tree’s roots as it seeks out water? As the tree pipes that water through a body an order of magnitude larger than your own, and does so without the crude central pump that leaves you humans so vulnerable? As it survives winters that would leave you a frozen meatsicle in the snow?”
I braced myself, but Gutenberg merely laughed. “I concede the point,” he said. “But the automatons weren’t created to house living flesh. You might be able to enter and leave your trees at will without losing your sense of self, but have you ever brought another human being with you?”
“No,” Lena said softly.
“Yet you intend to attempt it anyway.” He clucked his tongue and led us back into the office, where he grabbed a Saberhagen novel off the desk. He swiped his fingers through the book, sweeping away the magical lock like smoke. With one hand, he pulled a long, gleaming sword from the pages. “I can’t predict what might happen to you both. You might lose yourself as well as Isaac. If you do manage to succeed, I suspect you’ll have need of this blade. It should heal any physical damage . . . assuming he survives at all. Now if you’ll excuse me, I believe I’m needed in Detroit.”
“You offered me a favor.”
He looked pointedly toward the sword. I ignored the hint.
“Tell me what I saw in Charles Hubert.”
“You saw that, did you?” He gestured for me to step closer. “Are you sure you want to know?”
“Yes.”
“So be it.” He touched my chest, and I felt a tugging sensation, as if a hook had lodged behind my breastbone. “If you survive, I’ll tell you what I know.”
Gutenberg snapped his fingers, and for a moment, I felt part of the automaton’s magic tear free, enveloping him like a blanket. An instant later, Gutenberg vanished in a flash of sunlight.
Chapter 23
I LOOKED UP AT THE CEILING, imagining the sky beyond. The automaton was battered and possibly dying, but surely I had enough strength to make it back to the moon. Could I reach Mars in the time I had left?
Lena reached for the exposed wood of my face. I pushed her aside. “You’d be risking your life.”
“I heard the old man, too,” she snapped. “And I’m not interested in any noble bullshit. I’m not letting you die in that thing. Now shut up and hold on.”
She grabbed my forearm in one hand and cupped my face in the other. Chunks of black wood crumbled away as she tightened her grip on my arm, but she simply squeezed harder. It was a gruesome sight, and I thanked Gutenberg again for not giving his creations a sense of pain.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m not sure.”
I heard her voice inside me, even as the automaton’s senses picked up her words. Her warmth infused the cold, dead wood of my body. Her emotions twined with mine, hot and passionate. Metal blocks fell away, ringing against the floor as she pressed deeper into my body.
Whatever magic had created Lena Greenwood, her emotions were as genuine and powerful as any I had ever felt. Perhaps more so. It shamed me that I had ever believed otherwise.
I saw her love for Doctor Shah. Through Lena’s eyes, I saw not the calm, detached psychiatrist who had oh-so-coldly signed the papers that once ended my dreams of magic, but a passionate, devoted woman who walked the border between magic and mundane, giving everything she could to try to help those who fought the demons and the darkness.
I saw Shah’s grief when a Porter named Jared killed himself four years ago: the deep, shaking sobs she had refused to let anyone but Lena see. I shared Lena’s helplessness as she tri
ed to comfort her lover. In the end, Shah’s grief transformed to determination. Shah worked even harder to help those she could, like a libriomancer whose husband was killed by a spell gone wrong.
I also saw Lena’s memories of the attack a week before. I heard the crash of furniture from inside the house, where Shah struggled against impossible foes to try to give Lena a few more seconds, and I felt Lena’s anguish as her own strength failed her. I shared her fear, her despair at the death of her tree, and the seductiveness of its death. A part of her had wanted to give up then, to enter her tree and never emerge.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. To Lena. To Nidhi Shah as well.
“I told you to shut up.”
As Lena focused her attention on me, I touched new memories. I saw myself as she saw me, practically glowing with excitement as I worked over the fallen automaton at Hubert’s cabin. I watched my passion and joy turn to outrage as I realized what Gutenberg had done.
I saw my grief over Ray’s death as we examined his apartment, and my pathetically transparent attempts to keep that grief and pain to myself, to project an aura of strength.
I saw everything. Lena’s earliest memory, stumbling forth from a tree with no awareness of who or where she was. Her first kiss with Nidhi Shah. A trip they had taken to Wyoming so Lena could try to climb Devil’s Tower, and the nights they had spent in their tent together.
I had always known Lena was strong enough to break me like a twig, but I had never comprehended her strength as a person. She understood exactly what she was. She knew that someday she would lose Nidhi Shah, and when that happened she would lose herself as well. She knew, and she wasn’t afraid.
Even the murder of her tree and the loss of her lover hadn’t broken her. She had grieved as deeply as anyone, but like Shah, she turned that grief into another source of strength. She had sought me out, determined to live, to choose what she would become.
As I explored Lena Greenwood, she did the same, seeing me from within.
“Wait, you went to the moon?” I felt Lena’s amazement and laughter, her pride as she relived those memories with me, sharing my delight at fulfilling a childhood dream, my sense of wonder as I stared up at our world overhead. My awe at what I had done, and my excitement as I realized how much more magic could accomplish.