No one up or down the hall. He checked his smile in his cell phone reflection. Looking, if not good, then at least inoffensive. Cell phone back in pocket, crack the neck, roll the shoulders, game face on. Check the seal on the champagne. He rapped shave-and-a-haircut on the door. When Tariq opened it, he grinned, and tried not to feel bad.
“Hi.”
“If you want the truth,” Grace said over the earpiece, “how about: your morose self-pity, self-defeating mockery, and crushing attacks of guilt make me uncomfortable?”
He kept his smile broad. Tariq’s roommate bowed out quickly, and left the pair of them alone. Game face, Liam told himself as the man took his arm. He poured champagne; they clinked glasses. Tariq drained his. He looked happy. Then his features went slack, and the rest of him followed. Liam set down his own undrunk glass. His lips tingled, numb, where they’d touched the drugged liquid. Should wear off in a few minutes. “Sorry, Tariq.” He laid the man out on his bed, checked the vitals: all good. He hated drugging people.
“See what I mean? Guilt.”
“What Church do you think we work for, again? The Northern Vermont Provincial Church of Fluffy Rabbits and Joyful Acoustic Guitar?”
“I don’t think Vermont’s a province.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Hold on.” He heard a series of grunts and short, sharp impacts of flesh and bone on bone and flesh.
“As if you have room to complain about personality conflicts, o dame sans merci.” A growl on the other end of the line; metal clanged off concrete. Liam found Tariq’s fatigues in the closet, and his boots, shined. The fatigues were roughly his size; he’d have to fake the boots. “This may be the most honest conversation we’ve had in all the years we’ve worked together, and we’re only having it now because I’m fed up.”
“I have reasons,” she said; the mic picked up a swoosh of something heavy passing just overhead, then a man’s voice, cursing in maybe Turkish. “For a long time now I’ve thought talking about myself was—”
“A waste of time, I know.” He poured the rest of the champagne down the sink, wiped the bottle with a rag, and let himself out with a brief apologetic salute to the unconscious Tariq. “God Himself knows I have my secrets. We all do. I understand you and Sal have a connection we don’t share, wherever it comes from. I’m just asking you to consider how that might make me feel.”
“Come down here,” Grace said, “and get in the car.”
• • •
Infiltrations were Grace’s least favorite part of covert ops. They almost never worked against a prepared enemy. She liked shadows, and sneaking up from behind. Failing all those, fair fights had their charm. But to insert yourself into a unit, you couldn’t look too suspicious, couldn’t hide. You had to move and act like you belonged there, when of course you didn’t.
Norse, fortunately, lacked a military background, and seemed to have been arrogant or hurried enough to have resisted hiring an on-site advisor. When they drove Tariq’s car to the camp at sunset, the explanation Liam offered—Tariq and his partner are patrolling the woods; they brought us in for the gate—seemed to work. The guards coming off-shift told them where to park, and retired to the mess tent.
Not for the first time, Grace wondered how many systems were two bad lies away from collapse.
Stars emerged. Behind her, a generator coughed to life. Grace drew a flashlight, faced it toward the ridgeline, and blinked it three times; she saw a gleam in answer.
Fine. Sal and the others were in place; they’d approach, Grace and Liam would let them through, and with luck they’d reach the central tent before anyone noticed. This crazy idea just might work.
Then she heard a click.
“Drop the flashlight,” said a voice of wind chimes and gravel. “And the gun. Or he dies.”
Grace’s cross chilled and burned at once against her skin.
She let the flashlight fall. Unholstered the gun—slowly—ejected the magazine, and tossed mag and gun away. Small loss. She never liked that gun anyway. Not that she liked any guns.
“Turn around, slowly.”
The thing that held Liam—its fingers like knives against his throat, its gun against his temple—was not even close to human. It had a face like a broken promise. Red lenses clicked and refocused in its eyes, and dark oil trickled between the blades it had in place of teeth. A homunculus. That was why Norse’s servant had looked blurry on the hotel room camera—she wasn’t wearing magic, or using magic. She was magic.
The soldiers flanking the homunculus, though, they were plenty human, and did not seem to notice or care that their companion wasn’t. They had their rifles out, and level.
Norse must have used a glamour to make the homunculus seem normal to people who weren’t wearing silver. Saved having to explain his demons to the hired help.
Grace hated magic.
On even ground she could probably beat this thing. But she couldn’t move fast enough to stop it before it cut Liam’s throat, or put a bullet in his brain.
“Sorry,” Liam said.
She raised her hands, and did him the favor of not looking in his eyes. “I surrender.”
They cuffed her wrists behind her. The homunculus watched, and did not let Liam go until Grace was bound.
“Come,” the homunculus said. “He wants to meet you.”
Grace knew many languages, and swore silently in most of them.
• • •
“Fuck,” Sal said, and passed Asanti the binoculars.
“They’re taking them to the central tent,” Asanti said. “The homunculus has Liam hostage.”
“Maybe it’ll get careless. Maybe Norse doesn’t know what Grace can do.”
“Unlikely,” Menchú said. “Magic calls to magic. That thing won’t give Grace a fighting chance.” He frowned. “At least it has to deal with them, now, which means it won’t be around to stop us. We have the jeep—we could ram the gates, drive toward the tent.”
“Come on, Father.” Sal shook her head. “Grace said a frontal assault on this place wouldn’t work.”
Asanti lowered the binoculars. “I see only one option.”
“No,” Menchú said.
“I understand your negativity, but—”
“Magic has tried to kill us every time we’ve used it.”
“We don’t have much choice, unless you want to fight Norse once he has the book. Without Liam. Or Grace.”
Menchú paced the roadside in silence until the words came. “Even if we did want to use magic, how? Norse has time on his side. Machines. Tools. Knowledge.”
“We’re agents of the Church,” Asanti said. “Like the Knights. That gives us a head start. We need something connected to the library of the Knights of St. John—the study in the Palace of the Grand Master, perhaps. An archive or treasure house. Someplace with a mirror.”
“You’re suggesting we break into a major historical site in the next two hours, without Grace or Liam.”
“Do you have any better ideas?”
The silence between the priest and the Archivist stretched taut and angry, and Sal had to force herself to say, “I do.”
4.
“Miss Chen, Mr. Doyle.” Norse welcomed them with an offhand wave, but did not look up from his console. “Kind of you to join us.” He turned a knob, and the chants that filled the room adjusted pitch and speed. “Do get comfortable.”
The tent was brightly lit, and empty save for Norse and his machines. Two chairs faced the warped mirror in the wire circle. “Sit,” the homunculus said. A trickle of blood ran down Liam’s neck and stained his shirt. A claw had slipped, or else he’d breathed too deeply.
Before the mirror lay the farmer trapped inside his sack of skin.
Grace met Liam’s eyes, and sat. The homunculus walked Liam to the chair beside her. When the knife-fingers left his throat he tried to rear up and tackle the homunculus, but it struck him across the temple with its gun, and he fell into the chair. The homu
nculus retreated, gun leveled on Liam, until it was far enough away to watch—and shoot—them both if needed.
Grace waited. Beside her, Liam bled.
The chanting grew. Fluid gurgled down translucent coils at the tent’s edges. She did not want to know what kind of fluid it was; she strongly suspected she knew anyway.
Norse frowned, and adjusted other knobs on what Grace assumed was a mixing board. The sound didn’t change, but she felt a shift in her bones and blood. “It’s amazing what you can do with the Mechanical Turk,” Norse said, though no one had asked him. “Magic likes human minds—they’re its favored operating platform. Someday we’ll have artificial intelligence for this sort of thing, selective brain simulation, and we’ll be able to conduct massively parallel incantations. For now, simple human intelligence tasks are best performed by humans compensated—so cheaply!—for the loan of their brains. Like, say, an hour’s repetitive chanting over Skype, timing forced via click track.” A slider sharpened the treble of the sound. “Lag’s an issue, hence the mixing board, and it turns out there are a handful of ancillary effects for which blood and other humors serve as a focus or insulator, hence the machines. Cultists are easier, and more traditional, but their care and feeding has ruined richer men than me. I’ll stick with the modern method.”
Grace waited. Liam watched Norse and his homunculus, burning with rage Grace understood, but refused to let herself share. The machines burbled.
“No questions? No protestations that I’ll never get away with this? I’d hoped for conversation at the very least.”
Grace smiled at him.
“Fair enough. I work best on my own.”
He fussed over the board for almost an hour, singing softly to the chant now and again, pressing one ear closed with his finger to test his pitch. The words twisted inside her, wriggled through her blood. Liam roared in pain. “Stop it, you bastard—”
Norse flicked a switch.
The chanting stopped.
No. That was wrong. She could still feel the hooks in her heart, the worms beneath her skin, but the chant had transformed, vibrating some medium other than air. She grimaced. Nails scraped the chalkboard of the world. The tent pulsed and bulged like an animal rotted from the inside.
The warped, misshapen mirror in the center of the room was no longer warped or misshapen at all. The once-bubbled glass surface lay smooth as a reflecting pool. The frame stood just and true. Norse took a bow. No one clapped.
He knelt beside the bound man. A knife blade painted a line of red down the center of the flesh that should have been his face. Approaching the mirror, Norse wet his fingers with blood from the knife, and drew a circle on the glass. When the circle closed, the glass disappeared.
Beyond the mirror’s frame Grace glimpsed gleaming stone, a checkerboard floor, and light.
She could stop him. Even if the homunculus tagged her with that .45, she was fast enough, probably. If he didn’t have other protections in place. If she didn’t mind letting Liam die.
She shouldn’t mind. Fate of the world at stake: what do you do? Stop the bad guy? Or save your friends?
Norse stepped through the mirror, and Grace watched him go.
• • •
Breaking into the Rhodes Public Library turned out to be easier than Sal expected, at least until the alarms went off. “It’s a good thing,” Menchú observed as they ran past a circulation desk lit by strobing emergency lights, “that magic doesn’t need concentration or silence.” He had to shout to be heard over the sirens.
“Breaking into stuff isn’t my job,” Sal said. “It’s not my fault an evil wizard took our B&E team hostage.”
“This was your plan,” Menchú replied, which she really wished he had not pointed out.
“This way.” Asanti led them down a modern staircase; at least here the sirens weren’t echoing off bare stone.
“We don’t have much time,” Sal said. “The cops will arrive soon.”
“We’re almost there.”
“What are we looking for, anyway? Some old artifact?”
“Not exactly,” Asanti said, and opened the door to the women’s bathroom: buzzing fluorescent lights illuminated green institutional tile.
Menchú skidded to a stop. “What?”
“The records describe a purification chamber, with a mirror, in a library owned by the Knights of St. John. This is as close as we will get.” Asanti opened her purse and removed a cigarette lighter, a sleeve of needles, a thin paintbrush, and a silver bowl, setting each on the makeup shelf beneath the bathroom mirror. “If I’m right, Norse’s work has, let’s say, dug a well, bringing our world closer to . . . wherever the Knights sent their archive when they left Rhodes. We don’t need his resources to dive into that well alongside him.”
She burned the needle’s tip black with the lighter, pricked her finger, and squeezed a drop of blood into the bowl. Asanti licked the paintbrush to a fine point, wet it in the blood, and drew a circle and a line of sharp letters, not quite Greek, on the mirror.
Above, Sal heard a battering ram strike the library’s front door.
The mirror remained a mirror.
Asanti burned the next two needles and passed them to Sal and Menchú. “The magic needs to know all of us.”
Menchú glared at Asanti, at the needle, then stuck his finger. Sal felt her wound not as pain exactly, too much adrenaline for that, but as a warmth that collected in the red drop she added to Asanti’s bowl.
Upstairs, the front door gave, and booted feet stampeded into the circulation area.
Asanti elaborated on her design. The blood trail burned with black flame. It pressed against the mirror as if against a rubber sheet, but still could not break through.
Shouts in Greek from above, clear and sharp. Sal didn’t know the language, but she knew the sentiment: search orders.
Asanti frowned, considering.
“What are we missing?” Menchú asked.
“Confession.” The word slipped out of Sal’s mouth before she realized she’d been about to speak.
Asanti laughed, as if there were not booted feet approaching down the stairs. “Of course!”
“We don’t have time for confession,” Menchú said.
“An abbreviated form, surely. The magic needs fuel, that’s all. Tell it your sin, Father.” She leaned toward the mirror and said, “Mine is pride.”
The fire leapt, and the mirror flexed inward.
Menchú sighed, and leaned in. “Wrath.” The glass cracked.
A cop tried the door, which didn’t open. Sal wondered who’d locked it. The cop’s full weight struck the wood—panels, latch, and hinges all held. Sal joined them at the mirror. She meant to say, “Lust,” because it probably counted, but she did not hear the word that actually slipped from her lips before the mirror shattered and pulled them in.
• • •
Liam, in the tent, glared at the homunculus with the gun.
He’d worked his hands free from the cuffs. That was easy—all he needed was a bobby pin and time. But he couldn’t trick his way out from under fire.
Light seeped from the mirror, corrupting, glistening, like spilled oil at sunset. Norse was in there—how long would it take the man to get the book? If they could break the machines, maybe close the mirror off with him on the other side, drowning in whatever monsterland the Knights had used to hide their archive, maybe it wouldn’t matter, maybe even with the Codex he wouldn’t be able to tunnel home. A man could hope.
That was all they had left, now.
His fault, all of it. He hadn’t heard the homunculus creep up behind him. There must have been signs.
He turned left, to Grace. “I’m sorry.”
Grace stared back, then let her eyes slip sideways, toward Norse’s abandoned console. He read the message: Go for it. In spite of the homunculus with the gun. In spite of certain death. “Could have happened to anyone,” she said.
She must have a plan. He didn’t know what it could
be—she was strong, yes, fast, yes, but not that strong, not that fast. No one was. When her eyes returned to his, he waited for a breath, then blinked, once. Okay. He could not say with a blink: Whatever you’re planning, it better be good. “I trust you,” he said.
Grace went loose all over. He recognized that slack, the softening of muscles ready to work. Her shoulders rolled.
Her hands were still bound. He tried not to think about that.
He measured ten slow breaths, then ran.
• • •
Sal stood on a checkerboard floor in a vaulted stone room. Stone shelves crammed with books covered the walls, but the books were suggestions, memories: they shifted when she wasn’t looking. Only one book in the room was still.
She had not expected the Codex Umbra to be so small. It rested on a stone lectern behind a towering figure of golden light, whose face was branded with a shadowy cross.
Menchú and Asanti took shape beside her, or else she had just noticed them. And across from them, also facing the Codex and its guard, stood Alexander Norse.
Sal tried to run for the book, but she could not move.
A current flowed through her—no, that wasn’t quite right. Her muscles were wrong, too solid, too unyielding. She could let herself go, if she tried—flow beyond her skin and become something else. Everything else.
She remembered a carpet of fingers and a door of hair, remembered a goblin in a small apartment in Madrid, and ignored the temptation. She focused on her bones and skin. She existed. She stayed human. For now.
“You have come for the book,” the light said. “There is no other purpose here. Why do you seek its power?”
The light did not move, but Sal felt its attention rake across her skin. Something deep within her chest, some secret guilt or shame, curled into a ball, pressed itself into the shadows of her being, and hid. She tried to speak, but she could not find her tongue.
Norse seemed to have no trouble. “I have come to continue the old masters’ work. I call the magic to my service, and the service of mankind.”
“He lies.” Asanti’s voice was deeper and steadier than Norse’s. She strode forward, full of command, and the library flexed beneath her feet. “He has abased himself in search of power. He has no order. He has no comrades. And his mind is broken.”
Bookburners: Season One Volume Two Page 11
