Bookburners: Season One Volume One

by Max Gladstone

  Sal was a good cop—she knew that—but she wouldn’t have been able to put the case together with what the police had to work with. They didn’t cover magic and demonology in forensics training.

  Sal felt, then, an almost overbearing weight, of all the cases she hadn’t been able to close, all the loose ends she’d never tied up. The bodies with no names. The things she’d never quite managed to explain. How many of them were the tattered leftovers of some magical event? If she were to go looking, how many of those unsolved cases would she find in the files of the Black Archives?

  Was this what Menchú meant when he said that there was more magic coming into the world than ever? And would that just keep manifesting itself as a series of open cases, unexplainable phenomena, until there was so much magic in the world that it was too late to deny it?

  We’re not prepared for that, Sal thought as they got on the plane. We have no idea how to live with it.

  She was asleep five minutes later.

  She didn’t feel much better when she woke up in Rome. There was a debriefing with Asanti in the Black Archives. It went by in a haze. Sal reported what needed reporting—what she saw and what she did—but couldn’t offer much in the way of clarifying thoughts or analysis. Someone else was going to have to do the thinking right now. What she needed was sleep. About twenty hours of it.

  She was still on the couch when the others got up to leave. First Grace, followed by Menchú. Liam lingered for a moment, as if he wanted to talk to her. Sal didn’t have the energy and just closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them again, Liam was already starting up the stairs. She got up at last.

  “First mission,” Asanti said. “How does it feel?”

  Sal bristled for a second. That did it: Now everyone on the whole damn team wanted to know how she felt. But something in Asanti’s voice made her let down her guard. Asanti wasn’t worried. She was just curious.

  “How did it feel when you first got here?” Sal said.

  Asanti smiled. “For me? I was excited. But I had already seen a bit of what magic could do, and that glimpse was not nearly as terrifying as what you saw. Or as personal.”

  “What did you see?” Sal said.

  “That all of these things that we’re locking away down here are part of our world. As much part of God’s creation as the clouds in the air. Sometimes I suspect that if we understood it better, we would see that magic isn’t so much a part of our world as it is that we are a part of its world.”

  “Magic is God, huh?” Sal said.

  Asanti laughed. “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  “You don’t sound like you believe in the mission very much.”

  “Oh, I do,” Asanti said. “I just don’t believe magic is evil. What I believe is that most people should not be using it.”

  “Who should?” Sal said.

  “Officially speaking?” Asanti said. “No one.” Her smile faded at last. “I’m sorry about your brother.”

  “Thanks.”

  Sal was expecting another speech about how the Society was going to do everything it could to save him. But Asanti didn’t say anything. She was just sorry. It was all that needed to be said about it. The silence in the conversation opened a door. Sal walked through.

  “Asanti?” Sal said. “Are all the missions like that?”

  “No,” Asanti said. “Some of them are worse. Much worse. But you will see things no one else has seen. Things that, I think, will put you beyond faith. Faith asks you to believe that miracles can happen. You will know that miracles happen because you will have seen them with your own eyes. That’s worth something, I think. Worth the hardship. Though I don’t think it’s worth losing a brother.”

  Sal knew the answer to her next question already, but she wanted to ask it. She wanted companionship.

  “Will we be able to save him?” she said.

  Asanti shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “But your best chance is here.”

  That was when it all caught up to her. Perry. She’d wanted to tell him to get lost, when he’d needed her help more than he ever had.

  Grace. Tears of blood. Wrong smiles. The coma.

  Fingers tangling around her legs. An apartment that looked like it’d been dropped from the top of a building and crashed into the street. A man turned into a husk with a wretched, euphoric smile on its face. Did you see it? Did you see it?

  She saw it, all right.

  She found herself crying, harder than she’d cried in a long time.

  Asanti didn’t say anything. Didn’t ask any questions, or offer cheap consolation. She just walked over from behind her desk and gave Sal a long hug, until the sobs stopped and her breathing steadied again.

  “I just want my brother back,” Sal said.

  Asanti nodded.

  Sal’s phone pinged.

  “What the hell?” Sal said.

  “Who is it?” Asanti said.

  Sal looked at her phone. “It’s my parents.”

  “What are you going to tell them?” Asanti said. The phone was still pinging.

  I am fighting monsters for the Catholic Church so I can save your son from a demon that possessed him after he opened a magic book. It was so ridiculous when she thought of it that way that she almost laughed. But what was she going to say?

  Sal looked up at Asanti.

  “I have no idea,” she said.

  Episode 3: Fair Weather

  by Margaret Dunlap

  1.

  Sal’s footsteps seemed unnaturally loud in the empty corridor. She stopped. No traffic noises from outside. No thrum of an ancient ventilation system. No voices from any of the rooms she had passed. In fact, no sign of another living soul in the last . . .

  Sal sighed, checked her watch. Assuming time hadn’t become completely unhinged—and what did it say about her life that that was now a necessary mental caveat?—she had been wandering, lost, in the back halls of the Vatican for nearly twenty minutes. Which meant she was late. And above and beyond Grace’s strange fixation with punctuality, Sal hated being late.

  Unfortunately, she also hated asking for directions. Throughout her career it had always been important to her to be the one who helped other people when they got lost, not the clueless rookie who had to get on the radio when she couldn’t find her way through the South Bronx.

  Not that she had ever done that.

  Although, Sal thought, if I’m getting nostalgic for my days in the four-two, living in Rome must really be getting to me. As if that much hadn’t been obvious the night before, when she’d caught herself watching MSNBC International just to hear familiar accents.

  Sal looked around the immaculate corridor, filled with hundreds of years of art and artifacts. There was no sign that anyone used the corridor for anything, but still—not a speck of dust or dead roach to be seen. Clearly, it was time to get her head around the fact that—at least until she was able to bring her brother out of his demon-induced coma—she was really not in New York anymore.

  There was nothing to be done about it.

  It was time to ask for directions.

  If only there was someone to ask.

  Anyone at all.

  Where was Tom Hanks when you needed him? Hell, she’d reached the point where she’d have settled for a homicidal albino monk.

  “You probably took a wrong turn at the Old Gallery of the Late Crusades,” said a man behind her. “It’s an easy mistake to make, looks almost exactly like the New Gallery of the Early Crusades.”

  Sal whirled, reaching (for the hundredth time) for the gun she no longer carried. Although in this case, being unarmed was probably just as well, since the man who had spoken turned out to be outfitted in full tactical gear with what looked like a bolt-action rifle hanging easily at his side. Getting into a shoot-out in the back halls of the Vatican would be even more embarrassing than getting lost.

  “Who are you?” Sal demanded. Then, after a moment to reflect she added, “And how did you know
I spoke English?”

  The man answered her second question first. “I knew you spoke English because you’re clearly the new recruit for Team Three, Sal Brooks, formerly of the NYPD,” he said. “As for me, I’m Christophe Bouchard, currently leader of Team One, formerly of the Canadian Rangers, Quebec region.” Bouchard grinned at her. “It’s too bad we didn’t get called in on the New York job. I would have snapped you up before Menchú got the chance to recruit you for the Black Hole.”

  “Black Hole?”

  “Team Three. Books go in, nothing comes out.” He turned and gestured down the hall. “Here, let me walk you out of the maze, or Asanti will think I’ve stolen you.”

  Sal decided, since he had volunteered, that this didn’t count as asking for directions. Falling into step beside him, she asked, “So, if you know all about me, why didn’t you come say hi earlier?”

  “Team One and Team Three have historically not had the best of relations.”

  “Why not? Antique firearms aside, you’re the most normal person I’ve met in weeks.”

  “Antique?”

  “Were you afraid a semiauto would freeze in the harsh Roman winters?”

  “You were police. How often were people happy to see you show up?”

  Sal shot him a look. “You want to see my badge? I still am police. Just on loan to the Vatican.” Technically, anyway.

  Bouchard let it go. “We’re the guys with the guns who get called in when there’s something the Black Hole can’t suck up. And Menchú and Asanti don’t like admitting they need help.”

  They rounded a corner and a familiar voice added, “Also, Team One are a bunch of trigger-happy loons who never found a problem they didn’t think an arseload of C-4 couldn’t solve.”

  Liam. Sal wasn’t sure if he wasn’t happy to see her, wasn’t happy to see Bouchard, or wasn’t happy to see her with Bouchard.

  Bouchard shrugged. “I don’t hear a lot of complaints.”

  “You might if you left anyone alive behind you.”

  Sal could practically feel the tension vibrating between them. “Okay then. If the territory has been sufficiently pissed on, Liam is no doubt here to remind me how late I am, and I’m sure you have to go load your blunderbuss or something.”

  Bouchard gave her a wounded look. “You really aren’t going to let this gun thing go, are you?”

  “Not anytime soon, no.”

  Shaking his head, Bouchard offered Sal an ironic salute, and with a nod to Liam, left them.

  Liam scowled as he watched the other man’s departing figure vanish around a corner. “We should get back. Asanti’s got something for us.”

  “Glowy Magic 8 Ball acting up again?”

  “Signs point to yes.”

  • • •

  As it turned out, the Orb was sitting quietly in its apparatus. But that didn’t seem to make Asanti any less nervous.

  “The shopkeeper said he thought he had a book for me, a really old one, in Greek. But when I went to see him this morning, it was gone.”

  “The book?” Sal asked.

  “The bookshop.”

  A pause.

  “Well,” said Father Menchú, “that’s rarely good.”

  The priest-turned-demonic-book-finder heaved himself to his feet and reached for his coat as he turned to Liam. “Take fifteen minutes to dig up whatever history you can on the address, then head for the van. I’ll get Grace and meet you there.”

  “Fifteen minutes isn’t much time,” said Liam.

  Asanti was already headed toward her reference stacks. “I’ll keep working from here. I’ll call you if I find anything, or if the Orb spikes.”

  Menchú nodded and turned for the spiral stairs leading up out of the Archives. Sal called after him, “What about me?”

  He paused, clearly having forgotten that Sal was in the room. Sal quashed a spike of resentment. The rest of the team had been working together for years. It would take more than a few weeks for her to find her niche. But Menchú had recruited her, and it stung to be overlooked.

  He reached into his pocket and tossed an item he found there to Sal.

  “Go warm up the car.”

  Sal looked at the van keys in her hand. She was about to object that that wasn’t exactly what she’d had in mind, but there was no one left to object to. Sal sighed. She really hoped she didn’t get lost on the way to the Vatican garage.

  • • •

  Of course, even though Sal had successfully found, checked over, and started the team’s ancient white panel van without getting lost even once, Grace still insisted on driving. Given her experience with Italian drivers, Sal didn’t put up much of a fight. Traffic was at least a relatively nonviolent outlet for Grace’s more aggressive tendencies.

  On the way, Liam briefed the team.

  “Turns out, Asanti has been cultivating her own connections with the antiquarian booksellers of Rome for the last fifteen years. Which would have saved me the trouble of setting up my own if she’d bothered to mention it earlier. Anyway, her hope was that if someone came across an artifact, they’d tip her off and for once we could get to the book before anyone managed to open the damn thing.”

  “How’s that working out?” asked Grace.

  “Since this is the first we’ve heard of it, obviously, they didn’t find anything that needed to be bagged. Until now, I guess. But she says it has netted some obscure esoterica for the reference library.” Liam paused. “And also for her personal collection of diaries written by French travelers in West Africa during the colonial period. Which is another thing I didn’t know she had, but is apparently one of the most extensive in the world.”

  “Everyone needs a hobby,” Sal mused.

  Grace frowned. “I thought Asanti collected sketches by the early Modernists.”

  “Everyone needs . . . many hobbies?”

  Menchú cleared his throat. “Does this particular bookseller have a history of interesting finds?”

  Liam shook his head. “Average, at best. But he keeps good biscotti in the shop, so she visits regularly anyway. And before you ask, I checked the address against our records. No history of possessions, unsolved crimes, or even strange traffic patterns in the area. If something weird happened, it probably came into the shop from outside, rather than tunneling up from underneath.”

  “Does tunneling happen a lot?” Sal asked.

  “Iceland,” Grace reminded her as she pulled across three lanes of traffic and threw the van into park.

  Menchú caught Sal’s expression and put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “It’s rarely volcanoes. Sinkholes, sometimes, but like Liam said, that doesn’t seem likely in this case.”

  Sal was not reassured. “I would feel a lot better if I thought you were just trying to haze the new guy,” she said, and slid open her door.

  Unfortunately, she was pretty sure they weren’t.

  • • •

  When Asanti had said that the shop was gone, she hadn’t been exaggerating. What had once been an antiquarian bookshop, tucked away on a side street between a jewelry store and an art gallery, was now a pile of rubble. The city police had put up tape across the entrance, but there was no other sign of an official presence on the scene.

  “Just as well,” Menchú said. “Okay, everyone, let’s find out what happened.”

  Menchú went over to talk to a small group of onlookers clustered on the sidewalk about half a block away. Liam pulled out his laptop.

  Grace considered the ruins of the bookshop, the undisturbed buildings on either side, and the complete lack of an obvious demon or other bad guy for her to start hitting, and plopped herself down on the bumper of the van with a copy of Cold Comfort Farm.

  Sal, not sure what else to do, joined Grace by the van.

  “Tired of Jane Austen?”

  “Finished.”

  “Finished?”

  “She only wrote six novels.”

  “You know, if you ever want a break from reading all of Engli
sh literature, maybe we could—”

  “Can’t.”

  Sal blinked. “You don’t know what I was going to ask.”

  “You were going to suggest we grab a drink after work.”

  “Or coffee. It could have been coffee.”

  “I don’t have time.”

  Well, Sal could certainly recognize a brush-off when she heard it. Especially when it was delivered with a sledgehammer. She went over to join Liam instead. He was squatting near the wreckage with his laptop balanced on one muscular arm and didn’t look up at her approach. “I’m not getting much interference. That’s a good sign: if the book was one of ours, at least no one opened it.”

  “Do all demons wreck electronics?” Sal asked.

  Liam shuddered. “Not all. Just most.”

  “So maybe this was one of those?”

  “Let’s hope not,” said Liam, “but if I’m playing CSI for this little party, I’ll take a working computer for as long as I can get it.”

  Sal couldn’t argue with that.

  The procedure should have been familiar for Sal. Show up at the scene, talk to witnesses, start putting together a narrative to explain the events that had turned an average day into an extraordinary one, at least for this small segment of the population. The problem was that while Sal had the experience and the training for this situation, she didn’t know enough Italian to be useful. Besides, between a naturally warm demeanor and his clerical collar, Menchú was ridiculously good at getting the locals to talk to him, so even if she had been able to do more than stumble through a dinner order in a mixture of Italian and cop Spanish, it wasn’t as though he actually needed her help.