by Jim C. Hines
We had done plenty of not-sleeping together, but when it was time to retire for the night, she always returned to her tree. On the nights she spent with Nidhi, I’d hear the growl of her motorcycle around midnight as she returned home, not to my house, but to the oak tree out back.
Tonight was different. We lay naked on the blanket, nested among the beanbags. Her thigh rested atop mine, and her body pressed against my chest. The warmth of her skin was a comfortable contrast to the cool air.
Despite my exhaustion, both magical and physical, it took me a long time to drift off to sleep. Once I did, my dreams jerked me awake throughout the night. The third time, I rolled over to find myself alone.
Lena had moved to the corner of the room, where she lay curled around the branch from her oak Her fingertips disappeared into the wood. “It’s four in the morning,” she murmured. “Go back to sleep.”
It was good advice, and I tried to follow it, but my body was abuzz like I had mainlined an entire pot of coffee. After tossing fitfully for another fifteen minutes, I gave up and pulled on my pants. I walked to the break room and grabbed a granola bar from the cabinet. I had no appetite, but forced it down anyway. I picked up Bi Wei’s book on the way back, along with a portable reading light from my bag.
The light was designed to clip directly to a book, but I didn’t want to risk damaging the cover. I settled for clipping it to my jeans pocket.
As I opened the book, I found myself missing Smudge, who would have been trying valiantly to blister my skin and warn me away. But we needed information, and I couldn’t think of another way to get it.
I switched on my glasses and skimmed from one section to the next, trying to decide where to start. A description of Bi Wei’s first encounter with magic caught my attention, and I flipped to the beginning of the story. It was her great-grandaunt who introduced her to Bi Sheng’s teachings. They had spent most of the day hiking to the top of a rocky hill outside of their village. Bi Wei could have made the walk in half the time had she been alone, but she was happy to match her great-grandaunt’s pace, and wouldn’t have dreamed of complaining.
They talked of trivial things along the way, but Bi Wei knew this was no ordinary outing. She longed to ask what awaited them and why her parents had been so somber the night before, but she suppressed her curiosity.
The clouds blazed that evening. A glowworm clung like a beacon to a stalk of grass, bobbing in the warm breeze. Great-Grandaunt unrolled a reed mat on the grass. Atop the mat, she opened an atlas of star charts. Times and seasons were written into the margins, while pictures of familiar stars spread across the rest of the page.
“Find them,” she said.
I looked skyward. Clouds and splintered sunlight hid the night sky from view. The stars wouldn’t be visible for some time yet. “How?”
“Read with me.” She turned the page, and we read a description of the northern stars. The author had written both of the stars’ usefulness in navigation and of their beauty, for shouldn’t the most useful things be also pleasing to behold?
As we read, it was as though the starlight he had looked upon—and I somehow knew both that he had watched the stars as he wrote, and that the writer was a man—it was as if that same light brightened within me. Shock tore my manners asunder, and I cried out.
Great-Grandaunt was not angry. Instead, she smiled and turned back to the star map. “Find them,” she repeated.
This time, when I looked to the clouds, I could see the stars burning beyond. “The Celestial Spear.” Despite the sunlight, I saw the constellation more clearly than ever I had before. I felt as though I could touch them, gather them to my breast like jewels. “How?”
“Through the [UNTRANSLATABLE] of your ancestor, Bi Sheng. This book was printed a hundred years ago. It and its sisters were shared and read by those with spiritual and magical strength. As each of Bi Sheng’s [UNTRANSLATABLE. SUGGESTIONS: DESCENDANTS, APPRENTICES] read the book, the words grew stronger. We read each book again and again, refilling the cup of its magic.”
Just as Guan Feng had done for Bi Wei. How many times had someone read this book over the years to sustain her? Thousands? How many hours did the students of Bi Sheng spend with these texts, fighting to keep their ancestors alive?
I laughed with delight, an outburst that would have earned disapproval from others, but Great-Grandaunt understood. This book had brought the night to life. I saw not just pinpoints of light, but the Emperor of Heaven, the Celestial Kitchen, the First Great One…I saw what they represented, the meaning we had painted on the sky throughout the ages.
“Why me?” I asked, not daring to hope that there might be more.
“Because you see beyond the words. They open your eyes to the world, and you give them power, just as Bi Sheng did. Just as I did. And it is time you learn to use those gifts.”
It was a connection I had felt with few others: the excitement of libriomancy, of magic. None but another libriomancer could understand the wonder and amazement of that discovery, the thrill of our first forays into magic. With Bi Wei, I relived that delight through the prism of her life. If anything, her joy had been even stronger than my own.
In that moment, I touched her mind.
Joy vanished, replaced by pain and confusion. Everything about this place and time was strange. The only constant was the violence and war that had followed her. She had fled the Porters centuries before, and had awakened to find herself threatened by them once again.
Or had she awakened at all? Was this the madness that had claimed the Lost Ones? Power clawed like a beast trapped within her chest, fighting to tear free. Even as she struggled to contain the beast, it slithered through her fingers, seducing her with the promise of magic. It had been so simple to use that power to grasp the words of those around her, the angry orders of the one called August Harrison, the broken-but-familiar words of the Bì de dú .
Her own descendants practically worshipped her. Whereas August Harrison treated her with derision, as if she were nothing but a Miáo slave. Guan Feng often cursed him under her breath, but she obeyed his wishes out of gratitude and respect. He had been the one to restore Bi Wei.
He was the one who could bring back Wei’s friends.
Feng held her hand as they walked alongside a palisade of sharpened poles that led to a square watchtower. The ground was hard-packed earth, bordered by old wood and stone buildings. Fireflies crawled over the walls—no, not fireflies. Those were Harrison’s insects. Bi Wei was seeing the magic in each one.
Wherever they were, Harrison was taking no risks. He had ordered everyone along this time: twenty-four of the twisted monsters he called wendigos, sixteen readers, and another twenty guardians, not counting Bi Wei and Guan Feng. Roughly half of the humans carried firearms. The handheld cannons were as frightening and disorienting as the metal cars they had stolen to get to this place, traveling at unimaginable speeds.
“The north wall,” said Harrison.
Bi Wei didn’t move.
“What is it?” asked Feng.
She looked around, searching. “We’re being watched.”
I slammed the book shut.
“What happened?” Lena asked, fully awake and alert.
“It worked.” I studied Lena more closely. Her eyes were red and shadowed, her hair a disheveled mess. “Are you all right?”
“I essentially tried to switch from sleeping on a king-sized bed to a little throw pillow.” She managed a pale smile. “I’m fine. This isn’t the first night I’ve spent away from my oak. What did you learn?”
“Not as much as I wanted. I think Bi Wei might have seen me. She’s disoriented, but determined to save the rest of her people. There are at least sixteen more of these books, and a bunch of people she called guardians. They must have had a second camp or base somewhere.”
“Did you see where they were? How close are they to finding us?”
“Harrison isn’t after us. They’re looking for something else. Something magical,
I think.” I stared at the book, reconstructing what I had seen. That palisade was familiar. “Oh, shit.”
I grabbed my phone and called Nicola Pallas. The instant she answered, I said, “Harrison’s going after the archive at Fort Michilimackinac.”
“How long would it take you to get there?” Pallas asked calmly.
“Too long. He’s there now, and he knows where the archive is.”
To Pallas’ credit, she didn’t ask me how I knew. “Do you know what he wants?”
“Let me pull up the catalog.” I hurried toward the front desk and powered up the computer. I could connect to the Porter network and see what books and other toys were stored at the old fort. Hopefully something would jump out— “Wait. Nicola, did the Porters transfer everything from MSU to Michilimackinac?”
“Everything save a handful of books and artifacts that were destroyed when the building collapsed.”
I remembered the Michigan State University library, both as a student and as a field agent investigating the attack that crushed the entire building. I had cataloged some of the locked books the Porters used to store in the library’s secret subbasement. Of all the titles we had kept there, one would hold particular interest for August Harrison. “He’s going after Nymphs of Neptune.”
Lena had been discovered in lower Michigan. Until Lena, the Porters had thought it impossible to pull intelligent beings from books. You could infect humans from our world with vampirism and other afflictions. You could even yank something like Pixel the cat out of Heinlein. But a fully sentient mind? Impossible. Until it happened. Until an acorn from that book grew into a dryad’s oak, giving birth to Lena Greenwood.
Nidhi was the one who had discovered Lena’s origins in a secondhand copy of Nymphs of Neptune. Gutenberg had locked that book the very next day. I didn’t know how he did it, though I had heard whispers of an invisible inscription, a spell that spread out to affect every copy of a book. The locked book with Gutenberg’s enchantment had been moved to our archive in East Lansing for safekeeping.
“I can’t send another automaton,” Pallas said. “Gutenberg is still trying to repair the last one. Do you think Harrison has the ability to unlock books?”
I didn’t know how strong Bi Wei had become, but Harrison wouldn’t try to steal that book unless he thought he could use it, and that meant ripping open Gutenberg’s spell. “Probably. What about using an automaton to teleport someone else in?”
“The archive is magically shielded, remember?”
“How could I forget?” The Porters had chosen Michilimackinac because of its latent magical wards, spells placed more than three hundred years ago by French traders. Gutenberg had worked with Jane Oshogay, a historian and retired libriomancer who had moved here from Minnesota, to strengthen and build upon those wards. Wards I had foolishly volunteered to help test.
It had taken a day and a half for our healers to reverse the various curses, and another two weeks for my hair to finally start growing back.
“I’ll see what else I can do,” said Pallas. “And remember, I need your report on the Columbus incident.” She hung up without saying good-bye, which wasn’t unusual for her.
“He wants his own dryad,” Lena said tightly.
“It’s worse than that.” One dryad would allow him to restore the other students of Bi Sheng, but it would take time, and Harrison didn’t strike me as a patient man. “Why stop at one? He’s going to create an entire legion of dryad slaves.”
15
My mistake cost me my position with the shelter, though a number of the other volunteers privately thanked me for living out their fantasy, and several stayed in touch for a while. And then Hailey called two months later to tell me Christopher Hill had shot Melinda four times before putting the gun beneath his own chin and pulling the trigger. She said she thought it was better if I heard the news from a friend.
Nidhi found me curled at the base of my tree, crying. I recognized her by her footfalls on my roots. “I should have killed him.”
She knew without asking what had happened. Maybe she had already heard the details from a colleague, or on the radio. “You can’t save everyone, Lena.”
“I could have saved her.” I dug my fingers into the earth, seeking the strength of my tree. I wouldn’t give up what Nidhi and I had for anything, but for the first time, I found myself missing the simplicity of my life with Frank.
“You tried to give her a choice.”
“She made the wrong one.”
She sat down beside me and hooked her arm through mine. “So you should have taken that choice away from her?”
“What about her son’s choice?” I asked. “His parents are both dead. I wanted—”
“I know what you wanted,” Nidhi said softly. “You think I haven’t imagined similar things? Protecting the helpless, saving those who have been hurt.”
“You do something better. You help them to protect themselves.”
“Sometimes.” She rested against my shoulder.
“What would have happened if I hadn’t been there?” Perhaps his showing up to confront her would have hardened Melinda’s resolve to leave. Hailey had been trained for this. She could have helped Melinda to make the right choice. Instead, by attacking Melinda’s husband, I had driven her back to him.
“You didn’t kill that woman, Lena. He made the choice to pull the trigger, not you. Don’t you dare take that responsibility away from him.” We sat in silence as the sun drifted lower. “I spoke with the Regional Master of the Porters this morning about the possibility of you becoming a field agent.”
She raised a hand before I could give words to the burst of hope in my chest. “Pallas said no. Gutenberg doesn’t allow nonhumans in the Porters.”
“Can you blame him?” I sank back against the tree.
“Yes,” she said evenly. “But there may be another option. So far, my only magical clients have been human, all classified as low-risk. Field agents mostly, with the occasional researcher. But there are others who need help. Displaced nonhumans. Recently-turned vampires, werewolves, and others, trying to come to terms with their new existence. People considered too unstable and dangerous for a mundane psychiatrist to help.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’ve asked that my client list be expanded to level two and three patients,” Nidhi said. “If they approve my request, it would mean more travel, and I’d need someone along for my protection. That person doesn’t have to be a Porter.”
I swallowed, torn between hope and fear as I realized what she was offering. “What if I screw up again?” I whispered. “If I lost you—”
“I trust you,” she whispered.
THE BOOK I NEEDED wasn’t on the shelf. I ran back to the computer and pulled up our circulation database, drumming my fingers on the desk as I waited for the program to open.
“Even if he can unlock the book, he can’t create a fully-formed dryad.” Uncertainty turned Lena’s words into a question, a plea for confirmation. “It took time for my tree to grow. Years, probably.”
“Your tree grew naturally. Harrison isn’t going to wait.” I waved impatiently at the science fiction and fantasy section of the library. “Belgarath, from David Eddings’ Belgariad. Irene in Piers Anthony’s Xanth books. The water of life from L. Jagi Lamplighter’s Prospero Regained. The magic of those books could grow an acorn into a fully grown oak within hours, and Bi Wei knows enough of libriomancy to make it happen.”
“What about the other books at the archive?” Lena asked. “If she can unlock one, why not others? There are weapons in those books that could wipe out all of Michigan.”
“ Bi wouldn’t do that,” I said. “She wants to restore her friends, but she won’t give those books to a madman.”
“ Bi?” Lena’s brows rose.
“Bi Wei.” I had used the familiar term instinctively. It was hard to think of someone as a stranger after touching their memories and sharing one of the happiest moments of their exis
tence. “She doesn’t want to fight a war.”
Lena’s fist cracked the desk. “Do you think August Harrison cares what she wants?” she shouted.
Shock robbed me of words.
“She’s going to give Harrison an army of dryads. You can’t—” Her voice broke. “You don’t know what they’re capable of. What I’m capable of.”
“I’ve read your book,” I said, trying to reassure her. Where was Nidhi when I needed her? “I’ve seen what you can do. You’re amazing, but you’re not omnipotent, and you’re not a monster.”
“You haven’t seen everything.” She moistened her lips and moved her hands over the front of her body.
Between one breath and the next, I forgot all about August Harrison or Nymphs of Neptune. Blood pounded hot through my body, as if she had stripped away all traces of civilization, leaving only raw, primitive lust. I wanted to tear her clothes away, to take her right here. My chair clattered backward. I took her by the arms and pressed her against the shelves, hard enough that several books fell around us.
I didn’t care. My pelvis ground against hers as I yanked her shirt roughly over her head and flung it aside. I thrust my hand down the front of her pants, and she writhed with pleasure.
“Stop.” She pushed me away and held me at arm’s length. I tried to twist free, but her grip was unbreakable. Slowly, my arousal faded to more human levels, though my jeans still felt painfully constrictive. From the tightness of her nipples and the quickness of her breath, Lena was having similar struggles. “All right,” she gasped. “Maybe that wasn’t the best demonstration.”
I swallowed and backed away. “What did you do to me?”
“I’m sorry.” She turned away. “I told you once that I could feel lust in others. I never told you I could manipulate that lust.”
“Chapter four,” I whispered. The fourth chapter of Nymphs of Neptune put protagonist John Rule in the middle of a territorial conflict between a river nymph and a dryad. It was yet another layer of the author’s wish fulfillment fantasy, with both nymphs battling first over their borders, then over Rule himself, each stoking his desire until he was little more than an animal. He wound up bedding them both, naturally. “Before you and I got together…” I trailed off, uncertain how to finish the question.