by Brandon Getz
The port reminded him of Canal City, not so much in design as in bustle. There were bioforms from a million systems lugging bags and books and reading tools. It smelled, too, of travel sweat and mildewed pulp, and of the street food itinerant vendors were grilling along the walkways. Nobody hassled the crew as they made their way from the port into the teeming city—no PortSec, no customs. Seemed to Lars that any son of a bitch could walk into the Library with an anti-planetary nuke and good-bye to all the knowledge in the known universe.
He turned to Jay: “They just let us walk in willy-nilly? No pat-downs or rectal checks?”
She nodded toward the steel dome bolted to the wall. “Bots. They’re watching us, scanning us—if anything we do threatens the books, we’ll have a swarm of nanobots on us.”
“You sound like you’ve seen them.”
Auntie Hand, walking point in her quick-hobbling fashion, called back, “Yeah, we’ve seen them. They’ve still got my hexbook on their filthy shelves. A sacrifice upon the altar of posterity, they said. I tried to get it back once—their bots asked me to put it back.”
“And you didn’t blood-magic their shiny metal asses?” Lars didn’t figure the fiery old witch for surrender.
“They were persuasive. Agreed to find us somewhere safe to hide if I gave them the book,” she said. “And anyway, I know where it is—whenever I need it.”
Steadying herself against Boris, the Hand walked on, into the city of knowledge, the City of Books.
Dark shapes flew tower to tower, stack to stack, filling the streets with their shadows the whole way to the central temple. Lars hadn’t paid much attention. Birds were birds on any planet, whether feathered, armored, or bits of rubber tube. The streets were immaculately clean—another function of the Librarians’ bots—but the birds could’ve been hunting the city’s infestation of cats, circling prey. The cats, which boiled out of vents and tunnels between the stacks, were a cousin species to the station breeds: solid black eyes, thin writhing tails, the jade and white of their meat and bone turning thickly beneath sticky, translucent skin. Lars could smell them over the smoking grease of the street food and couldn’t decide which he’d rather nosh. He’d downed a couple of cans of mystery meat back on the cruiser, but it hadn’t been enough. Never was.
It wasn’t until they reached the steps of the temple that Lars realized the shapes hadn’t been birds. They were the Librarians.
Several of the winged stewards glided from an arabesque perch to land squarely between Auntie Hand and the temple’s entrance. The Librarians, the Priests of Books, were barely more than mummified corpses, each with cybernetic implants jutting through brown, brittle skin. Joints hissed with hydraulic pistons. Holographic monocles projected over sallow, deep-set eyes. Sun-bleached reptilian wings fanned out from their hunched and knobby spines, long strings of words tattooed across them in stark black ink. Their gangly humanoid bodies were wound with papery wrappings printed with symbols, each Librarian their own scroll of knowledge, their own walking book.
“Bat-winged cyber-mummies?” Lars said, gawking. “Expected something more in a cardigan and blouse.”
One of the Librarians, a tall one with clockwork arms and mouth set like an ill-tempered trout’s, crossed his arms. His wings fluttered. “We told you, Hand.”
“You are not welcome,” said another.
A third joining chorus: “Privileges revoked.”
They all smelled of dust. Lars snorted, the Librarian stink invading the delicious scent of grilled meat and stray cat.
The witch stared up at them through her red bottle-cap lenses. The gears in her prosthetic hand whirred—not much different from the arms the first Librarian sported.
“Auntie,” Jay snapped, moving forward. She turned toward the flock of Librarians perched on the temple’s techno-marble steps. “We need the book. Only for a moment. “
“The card catalog,” said the first Librarian. He snapped his metal fingers, and a holo-kiosk materialized like the ghost of an arcade game. “In the arcana and sorcery section, I believe.”
“Maybe you didn’t hear the lady,” Lars growled. He was too hungry for this shit. “No time. She tells you what she needs. One of you flying monkeys go fetch.”
“Se’grob,” Auntie Hand said, addressing the Librarian. “Bring us the book. I only need one page. After that, you can keep it. Shelve it in your bone-dry asshole. We’re going home.”
Se’grob, the Librarian with cyborg arms, sighed and shook his long, desiccated head, wisps of white hair shedding dust with the movement. A dark curve of metal on the book-priest’s face projected a visor of holo-screen, small flickers of light playing across its display, and behind it the Librarian’s eyes were creased and tired. “Which key?”
The witch’s arcane hand scratched the air, and Boris’s glass thorax gurgled. Behind the thick, cloudy pane, black blood swirled and parted, revealing the puzzle box. It gleamed in the light of the Library’s golden sky. Se’grob and his Librarians gasped.
“You still have it,” he said. “It can’t be. Too dangerous.”
“That’s why I need the instruction manual,” said the Hand.
Lars felt a tug on his leg. One of the see-through cats was nuzzling his boot, purring like a vibrator on full speed. All of its green meat was on full display with that skin, and the wolfman started to reach for its tail. Wouldn’t take more than one whack against the steps to render it dinner.
“Lars?”
Jay was looking at him. The Librarians had dispersed. Hand, Frank, and Boris were following Se’grob up the steps to the temple’s open archway.
“They’re getting it,” Jay went on. “The book. It’s on the East Face, will take some time to relay back, even flying. They said we could wait in the temple. They’ve got food.”
Lars shook away the idiot cat. “Those zombies eat?”
“Everything eats.”
That seemed true. Hell, it seemed like one of the Prime Directives of the Universe. Everything eats. He hoped it was grilled cat. He had a wicked craving.
Chapter XXXVIII
The food was shit. Five colors of paste, a black flavorless bread, and two yellowed jars of pickled fruits. From the temple entrance, a retinue of Librarians had led Lars and crew through a shadowy wooden maze of vaulted hallways lined with display cases and ceiling-high shelving—prize books everywhere, collecting dust behind matrices of security lasers—to a small reading alcove. Reading lamps snaked from the ceiling on bendable necks, making the whole scene look like the nest of some glow-eyed library beast, and in the center of a mass of giant, shaggy pillows was a stone table laid out with a spread of what passed for lunch to the mummified book-priests. Lars tried the paste and spat it in a spray of gray all over a pillow. Nobody else touched it. The wolfman could smell the sticky see-through cats threading through the corners of the temple, wondered if anybody would notice one missing.
In the alcove, Lars slumped on one of the big pillows, smelling the dead skin of a hundred mummies in its fibers. Almost enough to take a werewolf’s appetite away. He picked again at the weird bread, spotted something crawling out of a cranny, and tossed it back on the table. Beside him, Frank, branches bumping into the snake lights, huddled where he could. Jay paced the ends of the room and eyed the doorway, waiting for the sound of beating batwings. Not far from the door’s arch, Auntie Hand coughed and beckoned for her robot. The jars of pickles rattled as Boris stomped toward its master.
“No time to do this right, little bug,” she said to Jay, raising her steampunk prosthetic. The clockwork fingers jerked, and the cloudy glass in the droid’s core burst, glass spraying the shaggy pillows and a coil of black blood carrying the puzzle box into the witch’s waiting hand.
Wiping glass off his pants, Lars muttered, “The fuck, lady? In case of emergency, break glass, huh? You didn’t bother to build a door in that fucking thing?”
As the gleaming box settled into Auntie Hand’s palm, the black
blood fell away, splashing the dark marble floor like the remnants of some gruesome death. Boris, chest an empty, shattered jar, seemed unfazed. The robot swiveled and aimed its gun-arm at the doorway, eyes scanning. The witch gripped the box. Its golden shell caught the light of the snake lamps and glistened, its etchings and runes even darker than the pool of blood on the floor. The witch looked at it with a wide shark grin. Lars could see Jay staring at the box, too, entranced. She’d lost one of those fancy gizmos already, and had killed half the folks on a spinner to get it back. Hell, she’d even jumped into open space. Now here was another, the promise of a way back home, the key to the princess’s mission of righteous vengeance.
“Careful with that key, Gwildor,” Lars said, eying the witch. “Play the wrong tune, it’s liable to beam us butt-first to Eternia without my cruiser or any of our sweet rebel-bashing supplies. I’m not going to any universe without Sheila.”
The witch ignored him. The silence was making him itch. He didn’t like the way the two vamps were looking at the old box. Hungry for it, like it was pulsing with virgin blood. He had a bad feeling shit was about to go not at all according to plan.
“Jay,” he said finally, “we take it back to the cruiser, yeah? Tap up-down-up-down-left-right-left on the golden gadget and ride Sheila through, no problems. That is the plan, right?”
Without taking her eyes from the box, Jay whispered: “We need to open it.”
“I thought that’s what the fancy book is for,” Lars said. “Why we’re here on the holy planet of nerds and dweebs. Get the cheat code, head back to the ship, then pop open the doorway to Dimension X.”
“It is,” she said. “But—”
“Quiet,” Auntie cut in, handing the puzzle box to Jay. “We need the book to open the key. Se’grob won’t let us leave the planet with it.”
“Borrowing privileges revoked,” said the princess, echoing the Librarians. She held the box with both hands, reading it.
Lars hunched on the edge of his big pillow, all nerves. He wanted to stick to the plan. Sheila, the beer he’d stocked up on, all those big bad weapons from Fish’s secret room. They needed all that to take on the evil vampire rebels, didn’t they? Nearby, in the shadows, one of the cats skulked, sniffing in the direction of the spilled pickles. With one fluid motion, the wolfman grabbed the beast by the scruff and dug his teeth into its flank. It mewled for a long minute, back legs scratching his shoulder as warm blood bathed his chin. He’d have preferred it grilled and kabobbed, maybe with a couple of ketchup packets, but beggars and choosers and all that shit. He was hungry.
On the second bite, it stopped squirming. Neither Jay nor the Hand batted an eye.
Lars wiped his mouth and shrugged. “Just take the book, Jay. We’ve been stealing shit this whole journey. We have Frank, the witch’s ‘droid, and a lot of very big guns. Steal it and stick to the plan.”
Before she could answer, they heard the wings. A shadow fell over the doorway, and Se’grob hunched beyond it, wings furled, a gold cylinder glinting in his robotic hands. The cylinder was etched with runic markings like those on the puzzle box. The witch’s book. As the Librarian entered, Boris made no move to stop him.
“Stealing,” Se’grob said finally, “is grounds for having one’s borrowing privileges revoked.”
“Librarians, man,” Lars mumbled, munching another mouthful of raw cat. “Fucking sticklers.”
The Hand lurched toward the Librarian, diviner outstretched. “Let me see it.”
Se’grob swiped it from her reach. “The princess made the request.” The tall, winged creature slunk toward Jay almost reverently and held out the cylinder. “Your grace.”
Jay took the book, ran her long, pale fingers across its runes. It was old, and powerful—even Lars could see that. There were things in this universe that radiated history, things that were old before the birth of his home planet and the sun it orbited. Things that preempted time. His collection of metal tunes and porno mags seemed so eminently foolish then, ephemeral, against the presence of the ancient object. He was at once awed and annoyed; he wasn’t a big fan of existential bullshit.
As Jay touched one end of the cylinder, a hidden latched unlocked, and the book turned and opened, holding itself aloft in the space between her hands, its pieces moving like clockwork, runes lighting across the room like holograms. The book was reading itself. It was telling Jay its secrets.
The whole room was transfixed on the moving book, all eyes reflecting runes of light. Even Se’grob seemed surprised. Lars snacked on cat till there was nothing left but see-through skin full of slimy bones. The book shut itself, the room once again overtaken by shadows without the light of the text, and Jay grabbed the cylinder out of the air.
“What did it say?” Se’grob asked.
Jay held up the golden puzzle box and looked at the Librarian with her galaxy eyes.
“This,” she said. And the box opened.
Chapter XXXIX
A thunderclap like a rip in the pants of the universe, and the room broke, walls cracking and folding in on themselves, blue light seeping in from nowhere and swirling, a whirlpool of netherlightning with Jay and the cube at its nexus.
“What have you done?” Se’grob shouted, and over the crackle of the widening portal, Lars heard the flapping of a thousand leather wings, the angry buzz of microbots swarming. He tossed the empty cat skin, burped, and shook his head. She’d fucking done it. Jay had opened a gateway to another dimension—just like Fish had done in the space outside that spinner. Same light, same crackling fission as universes ground together like slipped gears. The plan was out the window, and all their shit would be left behind in the Library’s parking lot. He thanked the Hot Cosmic Jeezus and every faceless deity of the stars that he’d strapped on a set of lunar batteries before setting foot in the City of Books. Whatever was next, he figured his best bet was to take it in wolf form.
The batteries flooded his blood with lunar juice, and the change began. As Lars broke and stretched into hulking werewolf, Frank moved to shield Jay from falling chunks of ceiling. Marble shattered and sprayed as the tremuloid’s big branches swatted them away. Laser light flashed as Boris’s gun-arm unloaded into the hallway, bombarding enemies unseen. Se’grob, tattooed wings wide and long cybernetic claws outstretched, rushed for the princess. Lars crouched to leap and meet him midair, but the witch was already on the old Librarian, her diviner-hand blazing with blue light, channeling the breach’s energy. The old space-vampire thrust her magic hand into the skeletal chest of the Librarian, and Se’grob screamed an inhuman scream, breach energy shooting up through his throat, pouring out of his mouth and eyes in blue-white beams. As the Librarian fell, the Hand tangled with him, perched herself between the twitching wings on his back, and buried her teeth in his skinny neck. Her eyes flashed crimson, and around her hungry mouth poured the dust of the ancient being’s veins.
Behind Jay, the room was darkening and falling away—a void opening, ringed in hot blue lightning and the crumbling debris of the temple. Cats were pulled from their hiding places, fighting the gravity of the light, and burnt black in the orbit of the breach. Librarians were at the room’s entrance now, crawling over a pile of their dead. Boris’s gun pumped concussion rounds into the swarm of bots, the android’s claw arm twisting the necks and wings of pissed-off Librarians. The broken glass in his chest didn’t seem to bother the old bot. Just a flesh wound. Lars moved to help the robot beat back the mummified horde, but Jay was shouting, her voice fading to an echo.
“Come on,” she said, “it’s closing.”
He turned to see the warrior princess sucked into the darkness, Frank with her, and the witch, mouth full of dust, crawling toward them. Then Auntie Hand looked back, face creased with determination. Her cracked lips formed the robot’s name—Boris—as the swarm of microbots overtook her creation, the thing that called her Mother, filling the cavities of its junkyard body. Boris’s eyes turned to the witch, flickering as the nanobots churned
through it. As it read the old woman’s lips, its eyes flashed red, and its bucket jaw fell open, shouting a countdown in its dumb canned voice—Ten, nine, eight . . . As the swarm moved, the android toppled, a heap of warped metal, but the countdown continued, echoing over the roar of the portal. Librarians were over the mound of winged corpses now, the pistons in their bodies hissing, gaunt faces set with hatred, and the robotic swarm was reforming, searching out its next victim.
Lars heard the countdown, saw the black swarm rear up and lock onto him, the next target. Maybe his wolf blood would save him from getting eaten alive from tiny robots. Maybe not. He didn’t want to find out. He turned to see the Hand crawling into the shrinking breach and he leapt—knocking witch and wolf into the hot blackness of netherspace, the hole between universes, as Boris’s tin voice reached one, and the portal closed behind them.
Chapter Xl
The world between worlds was black. Hot and sticky, like the belly of a giant beast. Dense odors cloyed so thick in the darkness Lars thought he’d choke. Under the smell of his own singed fur, he smelled smoke, ash, opened bowels, dead things—smells of slaughterhouse and fire. He closed his eyes. Closed, open—it didn’t matter. He couldn’t see anything, even his own hands. He was still in wolf mode, though; that much he knew. He felt the hackles raised on his neck, the twitching in his claws, the saliva dripping from his fangs. No sign of Auntie Hand. The witch vanished as soon as the breach had closed. Lars’ wolf feet trudged ankle-deep in muck, his formtex boots still holding together even stretched around fat wolf paws. He sniffed, gagging, for information: for Jay or the witch, for Frank’s sick-sweet sap-stench, for the wind to tell him where he was and which was out.