Bookburners: Season One Volume Two

by Max Gladstone

  • • •

  “That went better than I expected,” Menchú said after the security launch deposited them on the dock.

  “You did great, Father.”

  “I thought you laid it on a bit thick, myself,” Asanti said. “I could have handled him without trouble.”

  Sal leaned against a stanchion, slipped off her left shoe, and rolled her ankle until it popped. “The plan wasn’t to handle him. We wanted him angry—or we wanted someone angry, at least.”

  “Arturo does have some anger issues to work out, it’s true.”

  “I,” Father Menchú said, staring off at the retreating launch, “do not have anger issues. I’m just passionate.”

  “Of course you are, dear.”

  They found a small dockside restaurant, open late, and ate stuffed grape leaves and small fried balls of dough and octopus until Grace and Liam returned. “How did it go with the guards?” Sal asked when they sat down. “We tried to keep Norse distracted; I hope we gave you enough time to work.”

  “Time wasn’t a factor.” Grace polished off the last of the fried dough. “I set the hook, but neither guard was biting.”

  “Damn,” Sal said. “I guess it’s plan B, then.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  She blinked. “What?”

  Grace’s eyes darted right to Liam, who’d taken a brief respite to consult the calorie tracker on his phone. He locked the phone, halved a stuffed grape leaf with his knife, and popped one of the halves into his mouth. Lines of muscle rolled across his jaw as he chewed. When he swallowed, he grinned.

  “Oh,” Sal said.

  He dried his fingers, then withdrew a folded cocktail napkin from his tux. “I got a number. And we’re in luck—he and his roommate go on shift tomorrow at sundown. I’ll drop by early. He says he can get his roommate out of the hotel. I’ll take the guy, Grace will jump his roommate, and we’ll relieve the gate guards. Easy.”

  “Won’t the team be worried if they don’t recognize the relief?”

  “If this were a regular outfit,” Grace said, “yes. But they’re stitched-together contractors. Nobody knows anyone else. A lot of the security personnel were only hired for tomorrow night anyway—Norse expects something big.”

  “Because of the solstice,” Asanti said, after a mouthful of beer. “The stars are right for the ritual after sundown.”

  “But Grace and Liam only go on shift at sunset. We won’t be able to get in the camp fast enough to stop him.” Sal frowned. “We need more time.”

  Liam pondered the second half of the grape leaf, then shrugged and ate it, too. “I think I can slow them down a tick.”

  3.

  Norse almost missed the camp in the predawn mist. He frowned: he should have seen the searchlights from the road. “Go back,” he told his servant. “Turn here.”

  By the time they reached the gate, the sun had burned off all but a few wisps of clinging fog. Guards stood at attention, rifles slung, dark circles under their eyes. “Sir.”

  Norse descended from the jeep. Mud squelched beneath his patent leather shoes. “Why are the lights off? What happened?”

  “Power died at midnight,” the guard replied. “We ran off generator fuel until we were down to the reserves. After that, we killed the lights and doubled patrols. No one’s entered or left the camp since the outage.”

  They should have called him—but he’d left orders not to be disturbed, so long as the tent was not compromised. He’d needed sleep last night, and meditation, incense burned on rooftops, charms chanted to prepare. They scratched inside his skull, burned his eyes. “The power’s still down?”

  “The utility office doesn’t open until eight. We called their emergency number. No response.”

  “Fine,” Norse said, though it wasn’t. He detected the Bookburners’ hands at play. “You left the fuel reserves?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  So they’d have power to open the way, and keep it open all night. Good. He clasped his hands behind his back, looked down, looked up. “Get on the phone to the utility. Send a team to buy extra fuel. One way or the other, I want power to the camp before dark.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He returned to the jeep and swore, fluently, while waiting for the gate to open.

  “Trouble?” his servant asked in a voice like hanging knives struck together.

  “Not yet—but something that could become trouble if we aren’t careful.” The jeep jostled over the dirt road his men had carved through Alhadeffs’s field. He wished the servant could offer suggestions of her own, could plan in ways that surprised him. He wished Asanti had accepted his offer. He’d walked a long and lonely path from Soldown Manor to the isle of Rhodes, and left too many people behind on the way, lying in their own firelit rooms. “Without power, I’ll have to perform the final incantations manually. Watch the tent. Guard the camp.”

  She parked the vehicle and said, “Yes.”

  The tent, in morning light, looked gray. Dew clung to the thick fabric and wet his hand as he parted the flap.

  Coils and wires, Jacob’s ladders and silver tubes running with a supercooled mixture of antifreeze and blood—all the accoutrements of magic—clustered around the tent’s edge, leaving a patch of bare earth in the middle, crisscrossed by more wires terminating in a silver circle. The circle, in turn, surrounded a mirror.

  All the devices and systems save the mirror were standard, insofar as standards existed for this work: they’d been tested, and those who performed the tests had not died yet. The devices amplified and accentuated power. Only fools trusted objects that worked magic on their own, but amplifiers made business sense. Back in the old days whole monasteries of cultists might have gathered to chant the same spell, lending their voices and their blood. Hardly tenable in the modern age. Industrialization spelled the end of all the old guilds and cults, even the mystic ones.

  But the mirror was different—was necessary.

  The most basic of all laws of magic was the principle of correspondence: like calls to like. Magic, at its root, was a form of con artistry: talk fast enough, in the proper languages, and you might convince the world two similar objects were the same.

  The Knights of St. John left few records of the old library that once stood where Alhadeffs’s farm lay now. They did not want the Vatican to learn the depth of their betrayal, however well-intentioned. Nor could they take the Codex Umbra with them when they fled Rhodes: the demons within the book railed against imprisonment, and there would be too many chances for them to break free on the long flight west. So the Knights used what power they’d gleaned from the book’s pages and made the library swallow itself: unmoored it from this or any world.

  That much he’d learned from darkness and divination. But he’d found the key in an otherwise-inoffensive English monk’s diary, describing the rituals of entry. We pass through the antechamber. We regard ourselves in the blessed mirror, carved from olive wood of this isle, blown from glass of this isle, finished with consecrated silver. In its light our impurities stand revealed. And through the mirror we enter the sanctum of the book.

  A mirror was easily made. The olive wood he’d cut from Alhadeffs’ groves. Nor was consecrated silver hard to find, in these fallen days.

  The mirror glittered, ugly, misshapen, in the center of the tent. It cast bubbling and imprecise reflections. But when night came, it would serve.

  His tools were useless without electricty, but while he waited, he could prepare in the old-fashioned way.

  Alhadeffs lay before the mirror, entombed in his own skin. Norse watered him with a can; the hide-caul drank hungrily. The man within writhed.

  “Don’t worry,” Norse said. “We’re almost done.”

  He drew a knife. Then he drew Alhadeffs’s blood.

  There were screams, of course, but muffled, and easily ignored.

  • • •

  The jeep Norse’s camp sent to town for fuel blew a tire on the way. The man in the pa
ssenger seat stepped out, knelt to check the tire, and growled, “Where the hell did you learn to drive?”

  No response from the cab. The man, formerly of the passenger seat, sighed. That was the problem with civilian security: everyone always wanted to play hard bastard of the week. If you were lucky, you worked with men or women you’d served beside. You had nothing to prove to them, and they had nothing to prove to you. If you were unlucky, you got a job like this. And then came a Pharaoh who knew not Joseph, Exodus read.

  “I’ll get the spare.”

  No answer. At least the money was good. He shouldered his rifle, walked around to the trunk, and began to unscrew the spare.

  An arm wrapped around his neck and squeezed. He tried to speak but breath wouldn’t come, tried to bowl his assailant to the ground but his limbs were heavy. His world went dark.

  Grace settled the merc to the ground, estimated his body weight with her eyes, drew a syringe, and pinched it into his neck. She tossed the merc into the trunk, then dragged the driver around from where he sat, as unconscious as his comrade. She changed the tire, and added the wrecked one to the trunk with the unconscious men. A dust-colored bird sang in the tree overhead.

  “Three seconds shy of your previous gank-two-berks-and-a-tire-change record,” Liam said over her earpiece as she kicked the jeep into drive. “But it’s early yet, and you may not want to overexert yourself.”

  “You did a good job with the power. Can you do that sort of thing anytime, anywhere?”

  “God, I hope not. The local utility was running an old SCADA system, a few update cycles behind. Once they find out what I’ve done, they’ll patch it.”

  “So they made a mistake.”

  “I would have found a way. You and Sal aren’t the only competent ones around here.”

  She turned onto a side road toward the shed where they’d chosen to store the unconscious mercenaries. “You sound defensive. What’s up?”

  Static and silence over the line. “Why are you and Sal such good friends all of a sudden?”

  She parked the jeep, entered the shed, and returned with burlap sacks and a coil of paracord. Good stuff, paracord—durable, cheap, knotted well, cut without fraying, and even if it did fray you could melt the ends solid with a pocket lighter. Most technological development since what Grace preferred to call the good old days, back in Shanghai in the ’20s, she regarded with suspicion at best, but paracord could stay. She measured out the cord in coils around her arm. “Friction between coworkers wastes time.” And I don’t have much to waste, she didn’t say. Somewhere, liquid wax ran down a candlestick—that was her life, burning off with each waking instant. She’d worked beside Liam for years, from his perspective, but he respected her privacy and hadn’t yet learned about her candle or her curse. Sal she’d known for months; the woman was infuriating, refused to respect tradition or precedence or Grace’s own boundaries. And yet, when Sal found Grace in her solitude, she’d reached out. Why to her, not him?

  She cut the measured rope.

  “You didn’t give me the time of day for three years after I joined this team,” he said. “That’s fine. I respect a professional. But now I’m wondering if maybe it was just me. Did I do something to piss you off? Do you not like me?”

  “I like you fine.” Sacks for the legs and arms, blindfolds, cord around everything, not too tight. She hefted the first unconscious man over her shoulder. “Maybe Sal just has a winning personality.”

  • • •

  Wandering down the medieval backstreets of central Rhodes with Asanti, Sal couldn’t think of anything to say other than, “So, you and Norse, huh?”

  The Archivist waved derisively with the back of her hand, as if shooing away a small dog. “He should be so lucky. Even if he were not, I believe the English expression is . . . ‘an insufferable prick’? He is younger than my middle son.” They’d left Menchú in the hotel, reviewing and blessing their equipment before the attack tonight. Nobody, so far as Sal knew, had conclusive proof blessings helped; that said, nobody had conclusive proof they didn’t.

  Sal considered letting that one drop, but didn’t. “You got started young.”

  “I started everything young.” Asanti looked up at the stone walls closing out the sky. “This is not the road to the Palace of the Grand Master.”

  “I know,” Sal said. “I wanted to see what else was out this way. We don’t have much chance to sightsee on these trips.”

  Asanti laughed. “It reminds me of my old days in the academy. Travel to scenic destinations around the world, only to spend your whole stay in a convention center that looks no different from any other.”

  The narrow street opened onto a cobblestone square beside the city wall. “It’s amazing these have lasted so long.”

  “They built fortifications to last in the old days,” Asanti said. “The Knights of St. John spent centuries defending themselves against invasion, or, from a more accurate perspective, centuries defending their invasion from counterattack—and they accumulated fortunes of plunder. They clung to this island like an eagle to a tortoise. In the end, though, Sulemain the Magnificent was too much for them.” Asanti blinked herself back from the reverie of ages past. “I find no appeal in Mr. Norse.”

  “If you say so.” Sal’s gaze descended from the ramparts to a squat stone building, a watchhouse or gatehouse, maybe. “What’s that?” Without waiting for an answer, she jogged across the street, New Yorkering past an onrushing Audi.

  “He is, I’ll admit,” Asanti said when she caught up, “a compelling adversary. I wish the Society would give me nearly so free a hand as he enjoys.”

  Halfway up the stairs, Sal turned back. “You want to kill people and raise zombies?” Two locals glanced over, confused. Sal grinned and waved and they moved along, hopefully thinking they’d misheard the English.

  Asanti bought a basket of cherries from a fruit vendor, and followed Sal up the stairs. “Of course not, though were such activities moral, there are a few people I’d joyfully terrify.” She chewed a cherry, swallowed, and spit the pit over the staircase’s edge. Sal wondered how many of Asanti’s victims would belong to the Society. “His freedom to explore magic does interest me. We stand on the brink of many possible futures: topias, u- and dis-, jockey for position. Norse is right, in a way. The Society, and organizations like it, can only protect the status quo so long. If the current rash of mystical intrusions is not a storm season or even a tide, but a rise in sea level, we may not have decades to acquire the knowledge we need. We may not have years.”

  “Jesus.”

  “That would certainly be one possible outcome of an influx of magic,” Asanti said, contemplating the cherries and the square. “Some elements in the Society no doubt believe, or would like to believe, that our traumas herald a second coming, or similar messianic event.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Not so many as you would find in some Protestant circles in your country, but I’ve heard people make this argument. In some ways this is a hopeful read on the situation—that the hierarchy believes everything is proceeding according to plan. There was, if you’ll remember, a film in the nineteen-nineties asserting that global warming was the result of an alien plot. The alternative—that my reports are being read, and then ignored, because systematic change is difficult and the current, let’s dignify it with the term solution, seems to work—is . . .” She searched the sky for the right word. “. . . unsettling. Norse’s freedom attracts me. His wealth lets him study as he wills without consequence, save, of course, the generally lethal consequences of dabbling in magic, which he seems to have avoided so far. Some people have all the luck.”

  “Why not work outside the system?”

  Asanti turned to Sal, head cocked, one eyebrow raised.

  “I’m not suggesting you go over to the dark side. Just—I bet you have your reasons, and they’re better than because I’d get in trouble.”

  “It’s a complicated subject. Cherry?” She offered
Sal one, and she ate. It tasted more sweet than tart, rich and fresh and full. “Cherries come from around here. Just up the coast, through the Hellespont past Troy, on an island smaller than this one.”

  “Cool,” Sal said, chewing.

  “I could have been lying just then, you know.”

  “Were you?”

  “You trust me. But here’s the funny thing: I trust myself, too. I’m smart. I think deeply, and for the most part well. I’ve been right often in the past, though not always. So how can I tell if I am lying to myself? If I believe a certain moral corner must be cut, certain risks must be taken, how do I know whether I’m right, or whether I’m listening to a demon’s voice in my ear? Reason models its own progress poorly. But you, and Arturo, and Grace, and Liam—I care about you all. I would not hurt you. If I find myself forgetting that, if you become acceptable losses, I know I’ve strayed.”

  “Like Liam’s trip wires. His possession tests.”

  “Similar,” Asanti allowed. “I’m in danger on my own. If I’m to be part of this secret world, I need to stand beside friends. Some days, to be honest, I wish none of this was real—that I was assembling occult knowledge in some research library for pure curiosity’s sake.”

  “You could try this place.” Sal pointed over her shoulder with her thumb, to the open door at the top of the stairs. “Rhodes Public Library. Says here the building goes back to the Knights.”

  “I’ll consider it.” Asanti chose two cherries, ate one, passed the second to Sal. “Come on. Let’s see what trouble Arturo’s made for himself.”

  • • •

  “I,” Liam said as he climbed the hotel stairs, “have a fantastic personality.”

  “Seriously?” Grace’s voice crackled in his ear. “You’re still on about this?”

  “I am a witty, charming, intelligent man who stands by his friends.”

  “And among your many fine qualities, you are great at letting things go.”

  He consulted the room number on the cocktail napkin for a third time, and counted down doors to 314. “I’m just trying to understand what I’ve done wrong in your eyes. So I can mend my erring ways.”