by Jim C. Hines
Lena called Nidhi next, and put her on speaker. The second Nidhi answered, Lena said, “You’ve got to stay away from the apartment. Harrison knows where you live. You can’t go back there.”
“But Akha—”
“The cat will be fine. She’ll scamper off and cower behind the couch like she does every time someone knocks on your door. Or the TV switches on. Or she decides the curtains are evil monsters trying to eat her soul.”
“Where are you and Jeff now?” I asked.
“Lower Michigan. About twenty miles south of Flint.”
They were hours away, which meant they were probably safer than the two of us. I concentrated on driving while Lena filled Nidhi in on the students of Bi Sheng. I was having a hard time staying focused. My adrenaline rush had worn off, and the abuses Harrison had inflicted were catching up with me.
Highway 28 hugged the shoreline of Lake Superior, with stretches of dunes on both sides. I pulled off the road and parked our stolen truck behind a station wagon. Down by the water, a family was splashing in the water.
“Hold on, Nidhi,” said Lena. “What’s wrong?”
“Shock.” I fumbled through my books until I found Roc and a Hard Place by Piers Anthony. I flipped to the dog-eared page where the heroine found a healing spring, and reached into the pages. The book resisted at first, but whatever the students of Bi Sheng had done to suppress my magic was wearing off. Once I touched the spring’s magic, I tilted the corner of the book to my lips. Water spilled over the yellowed paper, and a thousand stinging cuts gradually cooled. I passed the book to Lena. I still looked like a butcher’s shop had thrown up on me, but the redness and swelling had faded, and I could move without pain.
While Lena drank, I told Nidhi about Bi Wei. “I don’t know what she was before. If Bi Sheng’s followers had been this powerful when the Porters attacked, they would have crushed Gutenberg and his automatons.” I thought back to what I had seen, watching in my mind as Lena entered the tree. “Several of Harrison’s bugs snuck in with Lena. I never saw them come out. I’m guessing they infected Bi Wei with whatever devourer magic they were carrying.”
“You think the devourers are what make her so powerful?”
“I’m not sure.” I thought back to what I had sensed. “Her magic wasn’t like the devourer that attacked me in Detroit. I know this sounds crazy, but she felt like a book. When I read a book, it becomes a doorway to magic. In her case, the book is a part of her, and the doorway is always open.”
“Have you reported this yet?” Nidhi asked.
“I wanted to talk to you first.” Nidhi was no longer my therapist, but she was damn good at helping me sort out my own conflicts. “Bi Wei scares the hell out of me, but none of this was her fault. When Gutenberg finds out, he’ll do whatever it takes to destroy these people. Harrison can go light a match and stand behind a flatulent dragon for all I care, but what about Bi Wei and the rest?”
“We don’t know exactly what happened,” Nidhi pointed out. “We don’t know if their version of events is any more or less reliable than Gutenberg’s.”
“Yes, we do.” Lena closed the book and returned it to me, so I could end its spell. “Wei and I were together in that tree. I saw her. She knows time has passed, but doesn’t remember the passage itself, beyond fragmented dreams and nightmares. She’s terrified of Isaac and the Porters, and I can’t blame her. I saw her last memories.”
“I’m not going to like this, am I?” I asked.
“Wei was running, along with her fellow students. Three automatons were destroying their temple, ripping the walls down and collapsing the building on top of them. She fled to an underground library where a man was waiting for her. Her brother, I think. She didn’t want to leave him, but there was no time. They hadn’t expected Gutenberg to strike so soon. Her brother stood with her as she read.” Tears dripped down Lena’s cheeks. “His last words to her were a promise to hide her book so she would be safe. He knew he would never escape the temple.”
How many had died to keep those books from Gutenberg, and to get them into the hands of people who could protect them? “Could Bi Wei communicate with the others in their books?”
“She was alone,” Lena said flatly. “She remembers that much. Her readers were her only link to the world. Nothing else existed. The first time she knew anyone else had survived was when we were in the tree together. I felt her grief for how few remained.”
I picked up the book I had taken. That I had stolen. Broken roots appeared to impale the cover and the pages within. “I think the devourers were like Bi Wei. People who somehow fled into magic, but lost themselves in the process.”
“How did Bi Wei survive?” asked Nidhi.
“Because she had people to help her.”
Lena took the book and carefully tugged the thickest of the roots free. It left no hole, nothing but a smear of dirt on the cover.
“You’re not responsible for Gutenberg’s actions,” Nidhi said. “Whatever happened five hundred years ago, our focus has to be the present. Harrison has Bi Wei. What will they do next?”
“If they fled the camp, it means they don’t feel strong enough to face the Porters yet,” I said. “He’s not stupid. Eventually he’ll come after Lena again, but first he’ll want to assess Bi Wei’s power and build up his army.”
“Wendigos are supposed to be wild, foul-tempered creatures. How is he controlling them?”
“Probably the same way he controlled me.” I tugged at my shirt to unstick the blood from my skin. “He’s the alpha male.” Transforming innocent people into monsters was only the first step. They also needed to be taught their place.
“Harrison didn’t force the students of Bi Sheng to help him,” Nidhi said. “They’ve been willing partners. As for Bi Wei, whatever she once was, she’s been corrupted.”
“We don’t know that,” said Lena. “She might be able to control whatever is inside her.”
“She might, yes,” said Nidhi. “Or she might not. But even if she retains control, her last memories were of death and war. What makes you think she’ll stop fighting that war now?”
Neither Lena nor I had an answer for that.
“Where are you going next?” Nidhi asked.
“Home.” I started the engine and pulled back onto the road. “I need more books, and we have to do something to protect Lena’s tree.”
“You can’t exactly relocate her oak,” Nidhi said.
I could, but it would be tricky. Maybe a shrink ray to make it portable? If I zapped Lena’s tree, would it have any effect on her human body? Probably not. The tree had grown taller and thicker in the past two months, with no corresponding change in Lena’s height or weight.
I hesitated, then said, “Nidhi, you know Gutenberg’s mind better than I do.”
“As much as anyone can understand that man’s mind. There hasn’t exactly been a lot of research on immortal wizards.”
“Bi Sheng was working with movable type long before Gutenberg was born. He and his followers developed their own form of book magic. Do you think Gutenberg could have stolen those ideas? Then tried to wipe out Bi Sheng’s students to make sure no one found out?”
Nidhi didn’t answer right away, and when she did speak, her words were slow and careful. “I don’t know. He’s not the same man he was. How much have you changed in your lifetime, Isaac? Your beliefs, your values, your knowledge, they all evolve with time and experience. Gutenberg has been evolving for five centuries.” She paused, then added, “Besides, you don’t really want to know what I think. You’ve already come to your own conclusion. You just want me to talk you out of it.”
I had forgotten how annoying Nidhi could be when she was right.
“Thanks. We’ll check in again soon.” I hung up and tried to concentrate on the road.
Invention always built on the shoulders of those who came before. Would Gutenberg have been able to develop his machine if he had never seen a wine press, or if others hadn’t developed wood
-block printing and engraving plates? If not for the metallurgists, the coin-stampers, and more? Not to mention the foundations of magic, work and research going back thousands of years.
But the Porters’ records had no information about Bi Sheng. Gutenberg had obviously known of them, which meant he had deliberately omitted that information from our archives.
A year ago, I would have taken on faith that Gutenberg had a good reason for his actions. Maybe Bi Sheng had discovered magic strong enough to turn all of humanity into sentient custard, or summon Cthulhu to devour Australia. Maybe Gutenberg was trying to make sure nobody ever recreated and used those spells.
Or maybe he was simply hiding evidence of his own crimes.
Bi Wei and Guan Feng had seen the Porters as monsters. I was starting to fear they might be right.
My house appeared to be undisturbed. I waited while Lena circled around to the backyard. A minute later, the lights came on inside the house. She opened the front door to wave me in.
“I half expected to find the house burned to the ground,” I said.
“Are you complaining?” Lena shot back.
“It makes me nervous. Harrison knows where we live. How hard would it be to send a few bugs to short out the fuse box? What are they up to that he didn’t have time for a little petty revenge?” I shook my head. “The man was pissed. Sooner or later, he’s going to want payback.”
“He’s not the only one,” said Lena.
I hurried to the office to grab my laptop and the July issue of the New York Library Bulletin. A paper clip on page forty-six marked an article I had originally wanted to use to try to decipher the Voynich manuscript, a fifteenth century tome currently housed at Yale.
I stuffed the magazine into my bag and hurried to the living room. Lena stood at the back door, looking at her oak. “I hate moving,” she said quietly.
“I could rig up a force field to protect the garden.”
“And any one of the students of Bi Sheng could use their books to rip it down. Anything you do to protect my tree, they can counter.”
“So you find another oak,” I said.
“They sniffed me out once. What’s to stop them from doing it again?”
I had circled through the same arguments in my head as we drove. I hadn’t yet found an answer. How did you fight people who could both sense and consume magic? Maybe shrinking her tree really was the best option. But then she’d be unable to enter it. Like libriomancy with books, Lena’s tree needed to be large enough to physically hold her.
She left the house, heading toward the garden. I started to follow, but she stopped in mid-step.
“I’d prefer to be alone for this,” she said without turning around.
Her answer surprised me. Lena was pretty much the opposite of shy. “Let me know when you’re ready.”
While I waited, I tossed my ruined outfit in the garbage and grabbed an old pair of jeans and a blue T-shirt Deb had sent me as a present back when I started working at the Copper River Library. Not that I could wear a shirt that said “Librarians: Kicking Ignorance in the Balls for Over 4000 Years” on the job.
I returned to the kitchen and sat down at the table with the New York Library Bulletin. It had been ages since I tried to use a magazine for libriomancy. In theory, magazines worked precisely the same as books, but there were several complicating factors. Magazine circulation had been declining for years, resulting in fewer readers and less cumulative belief for us to tap into. The fact that more people tended to skim articles or skip some altogether didn’t help either. Then there was the impermanence of the format. How many magazines ended up in the recycling bin within a month? The power attached to magazines faded far more quickly than with books.
These days, print publications had to compete with the Internet, and the NYLB hadn’t had a huge readership to begin with. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see it go fully digital within the next few years.
I wondered if Jeneta Aboderin’s magic would work with Web sites. If she could use e-books, why not online content? That opened up a tremendous number of possibilities, some more disturbing than others. She could flood the entire planet with kittens and porn, not to mention certain categories of fanfiction…
I read the article again, concentrating on the paragraphs that described research into smart glasses that could scan and translate text as you read. My fingers moved over the glossy print, trying to reach beyond.
Nonfiction was a different beast than fiction, but the emotions were the same. I touched eagerness and excitement, imagination and possibility. I pressed until my fingernails whitened, and then I was through. My fingers closed around thick-framed glasses, which I pulled carefully from the pages. I swore as my palm snagged on a staple. Yet another downside of magazine-based libriomancy.
“Those are…not stylish,” Lena said from the doorway. In her hands, she held a single branch from her oak, roughly four feet long. It looked like she had filled a small plastic bag with damp soil and tied it around one end of the branch. Leaves on the opposite end rustled gently as she shifted on her feet.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“I feel broken.” She managed a pale smile. “What’s up with the geek specs?”
Black earbuds dangled from the hinges. The single-piece lens was dark glass, and might have looked awesome if not for the bulky gray frames and the red-ringed camera that stuck out from the nosepiece like a high-tech zit. “These are going to help me read Bi Wei’s story.”
We drove to Tori’s Pub, one of the oldest businesses in town. People said the first miner came to Copper River on a Tuesday, and by that Thursday, Tori’s bar was fully stocked and ready to go.
The smell of peanuts, pizza, and stale beer poured over us as I opened the door. Old logs paneled the walls, giving the place a woodsy cabin feel. Framed newspaper articles from the local paper hung on the wall closest to the bar, along with color photos of high school football teams going back to my parents’ time. Sheets of acrylic plastic covered the tables, preserving graffiti carved into the wood more than a hundred years ago.
A handful of people called out greetings. I waved and forced a smile, then hurried to snag a small booth where we would be able to keep an eye on anyone coming in.
I brought out Bi Wei’s book while Lena ordered a late dinner of pizza, chocolate ice cream, and a Long Island Iced Tea. “And Isaac will have a pasty. With extra rutabaga.”
“I’m not hungry,” I protested.
“I don’t care.” Her eyes dared me to argue.
I surrendered as gracefully as I could. After double-checking the instructions in the New York Library Bulletin, I donned the glasses and pressed a small button on the right side of the frame. A cheerful ding rang through the earbuds.
“Translation on,” said a pleasant but stiff female voice. I opened the book and studied the vertical characters on the first page. My vision flickered, and the image froze for a quarter second. A second picture appeared over the first. The new layer was semi-transparent, but easy enough to read. The [UNTRANSLATABLE] of Bi Wei.
“Sweet!” I turned the page and waited while the glasses translated the text.
“How do they work?” asked Lena.
“Optical character recognition networked to the world’s largest translation engine. At least, that’s the theory. The translation database doesn’t exist in the real world yet. So far, the company’s prototypes only do very basic word- and phrase-level translations, and their software is limited to English, Spanish, and French. But by the end of the decade, they’re hoping to create and market a set of glasses that will translate any language pretty much instantly. That’s what I used for the spell.”
I tapped the hinges of the glasses and read aloud. “‘The palace lady takes no delight in idleness, but devotes her mind to the latest verse. For poetry can be a substitute for the flowers of oblivion.’ Remind me to have Jeneta look through this thing.”
I flipped ahead to the handwritten portion of
the book and continued reading.
At thirteen I raised my gaze from the moss-covered paths to the angler with his brush and ink. As the slivered moon smiled down, he gathered me to his net of words. My grandfather’s tears shone from Heaven, and his pride opened the waters of the world.
The glasses converted everything into a simplistic computerized font, but I could also see the characters Bi Wei had brushed onto the page, the precision and the artistry with which she wrote.
“The angler could be Bi Sheng,” said Lena.
“Or another of his followers or descendants. Bi Sheng died centuries before Gutenberg’s time. Bi Wei wouldn’t have known him.” Or maybe we were reading too much into it, and Bi Wei just liked fishing a lot. Poetry wasn’t my strong suit. “She really did it. She wrote herself into the book.”
How many weeks had she spent preparing? How desperate must they have been to believe such precautions were necessary?
Words alone couldn’t create a complete mind. No author could. The amount of text it would take to capture a fraction of the complexities and memories of a human being would make Jordan’s Wheel of Time series look like a child’s board book. That was part of the reason intelligent characters went mad when they interacted with the real world. There simply wasn’t enough to them.
I thought about Smudge, remembering the damage he had done when I first created him. He was smart for a spider, but not intelligent or sentient enough to lose his mind. Not completely. Even so, he had been terrified, and nearly burned down my high school library before I managed to calm him enough to get him out of there. I had taken him to one of the old mine sites by Tamarack and let him scurry about in an empty cave for hours until he finally began to trust me.