Bookburners: Season One Volume One

by Max Gladstone

  “Come on,” Menchú said.

  The hallway turned and turned again, until they reached another carved door, not as ornate as the others. Unpainted.

  “Here,” Menchú said.

  The room had paneled walls, a plaster ceiling with a chandelier, a woven rug on a deep red wooden floor. But other than that, it was a hospital room. Perry lay on a bed with a thick mattress and a metal frame, surrounded by machines. Wires ran from his scalp. An IV ran from one arm.

  Sal went to his side and put a hand on his chest.

  “He’s breathing on his own, at least,” she said, putting the bravest words she could find on what she was seeing. “He looks good.”

  Menchú kept a respectful distance. “He’s receiving the best care he could get anywhere,” he said. “We’re looking after him physically and spiritually.”

  “Supernaturally, you mean,” Sal said.

  “Holistically,” Menchú said. It was a gentle correction. “Your brother isn’t in prison or quarantine. If he woke up and he was . . .”

  “Himself?” Sal said.

  “Yes, himself,” Menchú said, “he would be free to go. We wouldn’t keep him.”

  Sal swallowed.

  “I know we’ve talked about this already,” she said. “I know you can’t say what the chances are of getting that . . . demon . . .”

  “The Hand,” Menchú said.

  “Yes, the Hand—I know you can’t say what the chances are of getting it out of him, or if there’s anything else we could be doing to wake him up. I understand that it’s all a big question mark. But he’s still in there, right? Or has he been taken somewhere?”

  “We think he’s still in there,” Menchú said.

  “And he’s not brain-dead,” Sal said.

  “No,” Menchú said. “Not physically, no.”

  She moved her hand from Perry’s chest to his forehead.

  “What’s it like for him in there?” she said.

  There was a long pause. She could tell Menchú was searching for an answer.

  “God only knows,” he said at last.

  “God and Perry,” she said. Then, “Just Perry.”

  How do we reach him? He’s all by himself in there, Sal thought. Out there. All alone.

  Then she had another, much worse, thought: Except that he isn’t alone. Not at all.

  Right then, the chances of finding the cure, finding the right book, seemed so remote. Impossible. The tiniest sliver of a needle in a universe of haystacks. They’d found a pair of wings, Menchú had told her. A well that answered questions. Wondrous and useless, totally useless. Where was the book that would bring her brother back? And who in the world was going to find it?

  2.

  Gabriel lived by himself in Madrid, in the apartment where he was raised, a ramshackle string of rooms off a long hallway that smelled vaguely of mildew, though he could never find the source. His parents had both died, his father years ago, his mother not soon after, and he lived among the things they had left behind. The wallpaper was starting to peel off the walls; his parents had put it up when they moved in. That was their double bed in the biggest bedroom, their bedspread. Gabriel ate at the dining room table they had bought when they were first married. The curtains he drew over the windows were the ones his mother had made.

  Gabriel’s only regular visitors were two sisters from upstairs, Elena and Victoria, who came over every few days when they needed to escape their own parents, their own smaller apartment. They thought of Gabriel’s place as their secret castle. To them, its rooms were vast and unending, and they spent hours exploring them. The remnants of his parents’ lives were souvenirs from distant places. They loved the collection of figurines, of angels and animals, that Gabriel’s mother had kept. They took them out and played with them on the dining room table while Gabriel made them a snack. Gabriel liked the girls, appreciated the company.

  Gabriel kept the apartment, just barely, through a series of small jobs. He had been an office clerk. Then he was a cashier at a pharmacy. Then he became the manager of a movie theater. It was his favorite of the jobs he’d had, even though he knew there was no way it was going to last. The theater was falling apart around him—it was in worse shape than his apartment—while the street bustled with pedestrians outside. Almost none of them ever came inside.

  But he loved the movies. The owner had a taste for the surreal, which suited Gabriel fine. They played The Spirit of the Beehive once a month. They ran Buñuel. They ran Jodorowsky. Gabriel sat in the back, behind the three or four other people in the theater, and let those movies take him away. He knew they were supposed to be unsettling. They were designed to worm their way into your brain and lay eggs. Change you. But they didn’t unsettle Gabriel. He found them soothing. They were an escape.

  At last, the theater’s owner decided to close down the theater for good, and asked Gabriel to help him and some kids he’d hired off the street to clean the place out. The kids were from somewhere in North Africa. Gabriel didn’t ask where because it seemed rude. They spoke very little Spanish and worked hard. Gabriel gave them a couple hammers, screwdrivers, and a crowbar, and got them on the job of removing all the theater’s fixtures—the counter, the lights, the carpeting—all of which the owner was hoping to sell. Gabriel went down to the basement to clear out the film canisters that hadn’t been touched in years. He was sure the film inside was ruined. It had to be. As much as the owner loved movies, he hadn’t taken care of the stock. So it was just a question of clearing everything out. Which was how Gabriel found the book.

  It was on an upper shelf in a closet along with some old canisters and a rusty wrench. Gabriel had no idea how long it had been there. He slid it off the shelf and held it in his hands. It was big, big enough that he had to cradle it like a baby. A heavy baby. The cover’s thick leather was so wrinkled and textured that it looked like a mountain range seen from a plane. Gabriel brought it under the light of the naked bulb above him. There was the faint outline of a title. It had been legible once, maybe even gilded. But the gold was long gone, the lines that formed the letters worn away. As he was running his hand over it, he noticed that the book was warm.

  He had the strong sense that he had discovered something he shouldn’t have. But he wanted it anyway. He left the book in the basement when he dismissed the boys for the day so they wouldn’t see it. After everyone had left, he waited until the street was a little quieter. Then he carried the book home that night in his arms.

  He had left the windows open in his apartment and it was cold. He put the book down on the dining room table. The windows rattled as he closed them. The floorboards creaked beneath his feet. As he moved from room to room, he was, more than ever, aware of the bleakness of his surroundings. There was the threadbare couch he could remember from his childhood. It was long past used up. There was the braided rug on the floor, worn and faded. There was the chair he’d found on the street and dragged to his apartment. It took him two hours to do it and he almost never sat in it. The dim, tiny kitchen, the bathroom with the chipped tub. All the photographs on the walls were pictures other people had taken; almost none of them included him.

  He picked up the book. It still felt warm in his arms, even warmer than before. It occurred to Gabriel that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had anybody over, besides Elena and Victoria. He didn’t know the girls’ parents at all, beyond the barest friendly acquaintance. And he knew no one else in the building. The apartments had all turned over since he was a kid, and he hadn’t met any of the newcomers.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been out, either, with other people. He wasn’t sure when he’d stopped calling his friends, or returning their calls. They must have stopped trying to reach him after a while, but he couldn’t pinpoint the precise moment it happened. At the time, he felt like he was making tiny decisions. He’d receive a message, a voicemail, a text, something. Then he’d think to himself, I’d just rather stay in tonight. But now he saw ho
w all those decisions added up. He’d walked out of the crowd, step by step, over the years, and kept walking, and now he was alone.

  He regretted all of that.

  If I could be anyone else now, he thought, anywhere else, I’d be happier.

  His bedroom was at the end of the long hallway. He went in and sat at the desk at the window. He put the book in front of him on the desk and opened it. It was written in a language he didn’t recognize, with letters he’d never seen before. Were they even letters? Was it some kind of code? It was impossible to tell. He started leafing through the book, thinking there might be some diagrams or pictures, something to tell him what the book was about. There weren’t. It was just page after page of indecipherable characters.

  Then, under his fingers, the book got even warmer. The ink on the pages wriggled. The lines moved, rearranged themselves into words Gabriel knew, sentences he understood. He was in the middle of a story, a vast one, full of characters and action, too much to comprehend at once, too compelling to ignore. He flipped back to the beginning of the book, the first chapter, and read the first sentence.

  “Gabriel,” said a voice close by.

  His mother was standing right behind him. She put her hand on his shoulder. His father stood on his other side, smiling, hands in his pockets.

  “How are you here?” Gabriel said.

  “Just keep reading,” his father said.

  The walls of the room began to glow, as if they were made of paper and there was a warm light behind them. They wavered. A ripple passed through them. The floorboards heaved and settled, heaved and settled. Gabriel could hear more people behind him, friendly voices and laughter. He looked up at his father. His father wasn’t his father anymore. He was someone Gabriel didn’t recognize, but knew was a friend, a good friend. His mother had changed, too, into someone else, someone Gabriel felt he had known for years. They had traveled the world together.

  He looked up, into the darkened window. It was a mirror now. It was a vertical pool of water, still and unbroken. It carried his reflection. And he could see that he was not himself.

  He had changed into a younger man, tired after a long trip but satisfied with what he had done. No. He was an older woman, flooded with memories of decades spent with her partner, two women living on the edge of a knife. She wouldn’t take any of it back. Now he was an artist at the end of his life. He’d made a series of paintings that he already knew would outlast him. Two hundred years from now, they would fill people with awe. Now he was a girl, with all her life in front of her, nothing but possibility. She was surrounded by crowds, family, friends, people who would soon change her life.

  The water on the wall became a waterfall, and it unfurled into a river that flowed between his feet. The walls gave way and the ceiling opened up. The floor broke apart into a rich soil. Trees shot from the ground, climbed into the night sky, and spread their limbs above Gabriel’s head until they covered the stars. Gabriel looked down at the book on the desk, the open page. The ink was moving faster and faster, words flashing by, sentences shooting across the paper like arrows. He knew it was all going more quickly than he could read, but somehow he understood it all. He was ecstatic, breathless. So carried away that he didn’t notice at first that his fingers had sunk into the book itself. His hands had melted into the paper, until it was impossible to say where he ended and the book began.

  3.

  The Orb lit up, as though some ember smoldering inside it had finally caught fire. Asanti didn’t notice. She was amid her books with a headlamp, looking for Instances of Magick and Other Queer Occurrences in Clackmannanshire, written and privately printed by a Scottish city councilman in 1841. She’d read it years ago, but something about Perry’s case rang a bell. Something that made her think that Perry should be transferred to a more secure facility. He needed constant watching. Maybe they all needed watching. But she had to know more to be sure. She still hadn’t found the book when she heard the numbers clacking on the machine. She ran to her desk, picked up the phone, and hit a switch.

  • • •

  Sal was in her new apartment, a tidy little unit in a nondescript apartment building in a nondescript part of Rome. Someone in the Vatican—she would never know who—had arranged it for her. It was ready for her when she got there. White walls. A double bed under a fluorescent lamp. A small wooden dresser, a little table with two chairs. A shaded balcony that looked out over the alley behind the building, where cars went into and out from the parking garage underneath.

  It would do.

  Her phone pinged. She didn’t know she had an international plan. Someone must have arranged that, too.

  She got Asanti’s message and hurried across town. Into the library. Through the wooden door. Down the stairs.

  “You’re the last one here,” Grace said to her. She was standing in almost exactly the same spot she had been before. Did she even move? Sal thought.

  Liam was on the couch, tapping away at a laptop. As soon as Grace was done talking, he raised his eyebrows and shook his head.

  “I heard that,” Grace said.

  “Where are we going?” Sal said.

  “Madrid, it appears,” Asanti said. She was poring over a stack of papers at her desk.

  “Though where exactly is unclear,” Liam said.

  “We have the coordinates.”

  “Yes,” Liam said sarcastically. “We have the coordinates.”

  Menchú nodded. “Good.” He turned to Asanti. “Any idea what we might be facing?”

  Asanti didn’t look up from her papers. “Madrid has been officially purged of magic for over five hundred years.” She gave a sad chuckle.

  “The Inquisition?” Sal asked.

  “Oh, no,” Asanti said. “The Inquisition was just a witch hunt, and not of real witches. Nothing to do with magic at all.” She turned a page. “But even so, Madrid seems dry. There was a brief flurry of magical activity during the Spanish Civil War, and the usual spotty records of underground societies during the Franco years and after. But they seem like dabblers. There’s no indication that any of them got hold of anything truly magical. No books or artifacts or anything else that I’m aware of.”

  “So whatever we’re dealing with, it’s rogue,” Grace said.

  “That’s right. Possibly predating the Inquisition, when they declared the place clean.”

  “Arabic?” Liam said.

  “Could be,” Asanti said. “But that’s a guess. Not even a hunch.”

  “So we don’t know what we’re facing,” Grace said. “At all.”

  “Afraid so,” Asanti said.

  “This isn’t going to be like Eyjafjallajökull, is it?” Grace said.

  Asanti looked up at last, slightly irritated. “No, this is not going to be like Eyjafjallajökull,” she said.

  “The volcano in Iceland?” Sal said to Liam.

  “Yep,” Liam said. “You know those eruptions in 2010? No one could fly in Europe for days? Apparently not entirely the result of natural forces.”

  Grace interrupted. “There was a dragon. Seven stories high. Living under the volcano. Which had been there for over a thousand years, and was the subject of several local legends. But were we told any of this when we got on the plane?”

  “My Icelandic was rusty,” Asanti said. “It won’t happen again. It’s certainly not going to happen in Madrid.” She said it with a sudden authority that made Sal believe her. Grace did, too. She backed down.

  “Well, whatever is happening in Madrid,” Liam said, “I haven’t heard anyone call the police about it yet.”

  “Thank God,” Menchú said.

  “What happens if the police get involved?” Sal said.

  “You’re a cop,” Liam said. “You should know. Things get a little messy. Let’s just say the sooner we get there, the better.” He sighed. “Why can’t they just take the books out to a barn up the back ass of nowhere and open them up there? Everything would be so much easier.”

  “How�
��s your Spanish?” Grace said.

  “I can order at a Mexican restaurant,” Sal said. “That’s about it.”

  Grace shook her head. “Americans,” she said, under her breath.

  They headed out to the airport.

  4.

  The family living downstairs from Gabriel heard noises above them and thought it must be the building. In the apartment upstairs, where Elena and Victoria lived, the family heard their floorboards creaking when they weren’t walking on them. Something was going on below their feet.

  “Go down and see how Gabriel is doing,” the parents told their daughters. They knew he lived alone, and even if they didn’t know him well, they were worried about him.

  So the daughters skipped down the stairs to Gabriel’s door. They knocked. There was no answer. They knocked again.

  They felt a rush of air around their ankles, first toward the door, then away from it. Like a long, sighing breath.

  Then the door opened, all by itself. And great hands, strong yet soft, scooped them up and took them in.

  The girls didn’t get a chance to see what the apartment really looked like now. For Elena and Victoria, Gabriel’s apartment disappeared. Their own selves disappeared. They became wizard queens, floating in the air and creating kingdoms all around themselves with waves of their wands. They sprouted transparent wings from their backs and became pirate fairies, raiding ships and islands that floated in the sky. They were swooping dragons in a world where the only land was a sheer and never-ending cliff that disappeared into the clouds above and below them, and cities like gigantic mushrooms grew from trees that clung to the rocks. At last they were sea creatures they couldn’t have described to themselves, even as they were described in the book. They were slim beings with fins and gills, long, flowing tentacles, braids in their hair. They swam in a pink ocean among eight-eyed leviathans and a web of towns that drifted in the current together like a school of jellyfish.