Bookburners The Complete Season Two

by Max Gladstone

  He was sure Asanti would see it his way, given time. “I’m just saying,” he continued, “we have to consider the problem empirically. Every time, bar none, anyone opens up any of these books for any reason, they all but wipe out their neighborhood.”

  “You’re missing the point,” Asanti replied, with a degree of comfort that continued to surprise Liam. As if she were so certain of her rightness that the chance she might be wrong held no hint of threat, because—inconceivable. If only she’d listen. (Liam was aware of what his old teachers at uni would have described as a certain incoherence in this position; it didn’t bother him much.) “People, especially modern people, don’t tend to believe magic exists—really believe, I mean.”

  “Strange words from someone with your job.”

  “I was staunchly atheist before I began working with the Vatican, I’ll have you know.”

  “And now?”

  “A subject for another time,” she said. “But, yes—people aren’t materialist by wiring, certainly. Setting aside ontological questions for a second, our brains contain deep circuitry that leads us to ascribe agency to random chance. That said, we live in a materialist world. That is, only materialist solutions to problems are recognized as such. Consider the desperation most modern non-churchgoing industrialized human beings require before they turn to prayer, say, to solve their problems. Many faithful people pray and work on their own behalf, but in my limited experience people without a background in prayer turn to it only in extremity. Controlling for ideological factors, of course.”

  “If you’re looking to be saved through faith alone, Asanti, you’re in the wrong church.”

  “My point: Think of magic as a set of tools. Most people don’t realize those tools exist at all, and as a result only reach for them in fear or fury. No wonder they often cause harm. If a woman trying to defend herself bashes her assailant over the head with a bust of Diderot, do we lock up all Houdon’s work? Or do we recognize desperation prompted the bust’s use for an unintended purpose?”

  “That’s a very specific example,” Liam said.

  “I don’t pry into your personal life,” the archivist replied. “I’ll thank you to extend me the same courtesy.”

  “But in my years of working with this team, and as far as I can tell in the centuries before that, we’ve seen a whole lot of people getting bashed over the head with statuary. And some statues that seem awfully determined to bash people over the head unprompted. In fact, we’ve seen a good deal more of both cases than we have of statues being used for anything else. One starts to think that either there’s a problem with the statues, or with the people.”

  “Original sin,” Asanti said, as if pointing out a bluebird.

  Liam frowned. “That’s what I’m saying. We’re too flawed to be trusted with magic.”

  “Is magical power so different from technological progress? We have nuclear weapons.”

  “We don’t trust people with nukes either. And at least technology doesn’t have demons.”

  “Daemons, though.”

  “Are a completely different thing!” They reached a wrought iron gate between two stone pillars. Gothic letters on one pillar proclaimed: Saint Francis Xavier School, Est.—but ivy wound over the date. Black plastic spiders hung from the iron lattice, draped in sodden fake webs. Two rotting pumpkins rested by the roadside, grinning melted grins. Far down the winding drive rose the yellow-gray heap of Benefice Hall. “Anyway, to be continued. Can we both agree, at least, that anyone who lived in a place like this would be sore tempted to put out his own eyes with whatever he had to hand, even were magic completely out of the picture?”

  Asanti shrugged good-naturedly. “For the moment.”

  Liam raised his hand to signal the rest of the group, turned around, and saw Sal barreling toward them down the road. Then he saw what was behind her. Then he cursed, and screamed, and ran.

  • • •

  Come on, kid. You don’t have much time.

  If Joseph didn’t look, it couldn’t—no. That never worked in films. It never worked with Stevie Jenks.

  The label on the shelf to his right read: Planets. The shelf was half-full of old books about Mars and a bunch of manuals from the seventies for building Orion rockets and starting colonies on other planets. And, just behind his right ear, rested a book that didn’t belong.

  It was shelved face-out, on a metal stand. Pale leather binding. Front cover embossed with a big bearded face, like the ones on Greek statues, only without eyes. Thick paper, deckled edges that rippled as he watched, like tall grass when the wind blew.

  It could not be glowing in the dark. It was just so ghostly-green that it seemed phosphorescent.

  Which wasn’t much better.

  I can help, the book said. The bearded, eyeless face did not change, but seemed just this side of earnest. That’s why you came here, isn’t it? You want help. Open me.

  Joseph dove for the loading dock door, and hit the lever with his shoulder.

  The door rattled against the jamb; the lock didn’t budge.

  “He’s over there!”

  Stevie Jenks’s voice. Two skeletons, Frankenstein’s monster, and a ghost turned toward Joseph at once, and charged through the science section toward him.

  Shame about the door, kid. Way I see it, you got two choices. Fight them—or let me help you out.

  The ghost rounded the last corner and ran toward him.

  Joseph grabbed the book. Its leather stung his hands. He opened it.

  “I want to go home.”

  Kid, the book said, we can do a lot better than that.

  He felt the bearded face smile beneath his hand.

  Let’s make them run.

  4.

  Everyone, no matter how much they love their job, hates some part of it, and running was the element of her duties as archivist which Asanti particularly loathed. All she’d ever wanted was to study magic; unfortunately, that study required the occasional bout of fieldwork, and her recent experience of fieldwork turned out to require a frustrating level of cardiovascular fitness.

  She was, of course, terrified. That’s why she was joking to herself about cardiovascular fitness, et cetera. Nervous tic—curse of an overdeveloped sense of irony. Few and far between were the librarians killed in the line of duty. Fewer still were those who died outside; one didn’t tend to be drawn to this business by a love of the great outdoors. She wondered if anyone had ever assembled that list, and if not, how one would go about doing so. Intellectual historians would be a good start. Certainly the Vatican kept casualty records, which perhaps they would let her use—

  If she survived. Which depended on running. So she ran.

  Mist seeped from the ground and rolled in from the woods. She couldn’t see the grass anymore: The campus grounds had become a bowl of mist rising to the treetops. Mist rolled from the gaping windows of Benefice Hall, cascaded down its face. Shapes swelled and broke the mist, enormous green bodies, grasping gnarled claws, fanged skulls cresting the gray only to dip below again, like whales shadowing the surface. Or maybe she was wrong about the shapes. She tried to make herself stop, to identify them—if they made it out of here alive, such monsters would prove fantastic additions to her field guide—but when she tried to turn, the ground lurched beneath her. She stumbled, recovered without turning her ankle, small mercy. Couldn’t get a clean look at them while running, of course. She tried to stop, just for a second; they had enough of a lead, surely—

  Terror caught her in the stomach, squeezed, turned a tuning key in her spine. Her nerves locked, restarted, and she found herself sprinting again.

  Liam ran just ahead of her, pale with utter terror; he wasn’t looking, wasn’t trying to help. Menchú cried out behind them; Asanti risked a glance back to look, saw him fall. In a blur, Grace reached his side, slung the man across her shoulders in a fireman’s carry, and ran, easily passing Asanti and Liam both. Sal caught up, muscles burning, and kept running. Didn’t look. None
of them were looking. Asanti hadn’t even looked back for Sal; Grace had returned for Arturo, but she wasn’t trying to fight. Liam was pulling ahead.

  That was wrong. All of this was wrong. Wrong that Grace should run, wrong that Sal shouldn’t try to help.

  “Liam!” she shouted. “What are you running from?”

  “Are you mental? I’m running from what’s behind us!”

  “What is that?”

  “Don’t you fucking see?”

  “No!” She was panting now, her legs about to give.

  “Come on.” He slowed, caught her wrist, pulled her forward. “Got to run, we’ve got to stay ahead of these things, I can’t let them catch me.”

  She stumbled, balanced herself, breath wheezed in her lungs; behind them something enormous howled. Hot breath scorched her neck. Too close for the mist. Liam wasn’t leaving her. Not yet. She could see he wanted to—that cut and polished body tense, furious, desperate. “You don’t want to run,” she said.

  “The hell you say.”

  “You don’t! This isn’t what we do, Liam. This isn’t the job. Something’s”—couldn’t breathe, couldn’t—“Something’s keeping us running. This is magic. We’re trapped in it right now.”

  “Those things are after us.”

  “We can’t even see them. We don’t know what they are.”

  “I saw. I know.”

  “Liam. Trust me.” If he didn’t, that might be the last thing he would ever do. Of course, if she was wrong, and he did, the same applied. “Stop.”

  • • •

  “It’s a library,” Liam said, in the silence that followed.

  Asanti nodded. “Though it could use some work.”

  They stood on a stone floor beneath high arched ceilings. Shelves lay on their sides, books spilled everywhere, splayed open. Pages fluttered in unfelt wind. People filled the space around them: children in costume, teachers, a mailman. Father Cullough, whom Asanti recognized from his file. Fear twisted their faces. A gray caul lay over and around them, leaching color from the air, muffling their screams. They ran ceaselessly around the broken library’s edge, trapped in shadow like ants in honey. Asanti saw Sal, saw Grace carrying Arturo. She didn’t call to them. She had no illusions about that strategy’s likely efficacy.

  “Were we here all along?”

  “Drawn here,” Asanti said. “Probably by him.”

  She nodded at the boy floating in midair.

  He’d made the costume himself, she would have bet—the stitching on his night-blue wizard’s robe looked self-taught, and the glitter-and-hot-glue stars had the wiggle of an uncertain crafter’s hand. When she’d taught her own grandchildren how to use the glue gun, the lines they’d first made had shaken like that. She imagined this boy studying books and websites to learn how to make this foolish thing, and her heart hurt for him.

  The cotton ball beard hung in patches from his cheeks; it no longer hid the chin strap of his construction-paper hat. The magic had robbed everyone else of color, and bestowed all that on the boy: ill-framed as his costume might be, it pulsed with life, its cheap felt deep as a sky, glitter stars brilliant as any real ones Asanti had ever seen. Tears and snot streaked his face, smearing the charcoal lines of makeup he’d drawn on to make himself look older. He held a book before him, bound in white leather stained red where his hands touched. Blood dripped from cuts in his fingers and palm. His eyes were pink and swollen from crying, but he read through the tears. His lips moved. The words he spoke blurred and slipped from Asanti’s hearing. Trying to understand them felt like trying to grasp small smooth river rocks in a flood. If she didn’t know Catalan or Finnish or Javanese, she would have thought he was speaking Catalan or Finnish or Javanese. She did, so she didn’t.

  She picked her way toward him across the toppled shelves. As she approached, she felt her colors swell with his: the yellows of her blouse and the gold stripe in her trousers, the fullness of her skin. His words softened as she approached, and grew more distinct. There was a grammar to them; if she lingered here for long enough, she could catch it, learn it, use it. But that was not why she had come. “You’re scared,” she said.

  Liam, from beyond the wrecked shelves, shouted: “Close the book.”

  “No. We might kill him. The boy is halfway between our world and theirs, now. If we close it, he’ll be trapped on the other side.”

  “Worth it, goddammit.” He climbed toward her, toward the kid. “All these people stuck here. It’s growing. Close the book, Asanti. Close it.”

  “Hush, Liam,” she said. “This is a library.”

  She reached into the heart of the color. Whatever this book had done, whatever fear the poor boy brought with him, he’d found safety here. He’d found a power and let it shine. She cupped his cheek, and guided his eyes from the page. “It’s okay,” she said. “You’re safe. You can stop.”

  He looked at her, and she hoped he saw reflected in her eyes what she saw in his.

  He closed the book.

  There was a loud silence, and the world blinked.

  • • •

  Cleanup took less time than Sal expected. When she had come to, between one terrified footfall and the next, she found herself in what looked like a library that magic had tossed all to shit—a location-event combo with which she’d had entirely too much experience in the last year—alone with a few hundred of her closest fellow victims, wondering what exactly she’d been scared of. A mist? Shapes in the trees? Footsteps?

  Asanti knelt beside a kid in a wizard’s robe, hugging him. He sobbed into her shoulder. He still held the book. Menchú swept in with the shroud. The kid tensed; Asanti took the shroud from Menchú, and wrapped the kid’s book tight. A middle-aged woman wearing a Mrs. Frizzle costume—the librarian, maybe, given that her first expression on recovery was a cry of dismay—ran to the boy’s side; Asanti released him with only a second’s reluctance. Liam watched. Sal didn’t know what to make of the look on his face.

  She checked her cell. Full bars. Nice. Not perfect as a magic detector, but it worked okay. A call to Sansone, and Team Two’s local forces rolled in. Menchú met them at the gate with the school headmaster, who proved shaken, unsteady, and utterly willing to be guided by a man in a priest’s collar. The Team Two reps turned out to be therapists, mostly. Sal wasn’t sure what she had been expecting—a SWAT team? Balloon and Stretch 2.0? Sansone’s promise of a kinder, gentler Team Two seemed to be bearing fruit. Which just made Sal more suspicious, but never mind the bollocks.

  Here’s the Sex Pistols.

  Anyway.

  It had been a very long day.

  Sal found Grace leaning against one wall, thumb in a school library copy of The Westing Game that looked to have come through the affair with only minor cover damage. “You okay?”

  Grace shrugged.

  “I mean, the magic made you run away, and you never run away. I can see that hitting you hard.”

  “That’s magic,” she said. “Makes you do stuff, sometimes. It’s helpful, in a way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Now I know what I’ll do if I ever get too scared to fight.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Get Arturo out first. Then come back for the rest of you.” She didn’t grin, but there was humor somewhere in her voice—or maybe Sal was imagining it.

  Sal joined Liam on cleanup, righting fallen shelves under the librarian’s direction, restoring some semblance of order. Least they could do. Asanti spent most of her time with the librarian and the kid. Sal caught Liam glancing over his shoulder at them, once or twice. “What?”

  “I told her to close the book,” he said, “and trap him on the other side. It didn’t even occur to me that he might be able to close it himself.”

  “You couldn’t have known.”

  “I didn’t know because I didn’t think.” He heaved a bookcase upright with too much force. Mysteries spilled out. “I’m only alive because Father Menchú did think, when he f
ound me. If he hadn’t, I’d be …” He shook his head. “Out there, somewhere.”

  “Everyone makes mistakes. You’re allowed a few.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “But I tend to make big ones.”

  5.

  The Black Archives looked like the Black Archives did these days, scholars and shelves and machines and all, and if you wanted a more detailed description you should have asked Sal some day when she wasn’t suffering from three consecutive back-to-back pond-hopping jet lags. The spirit was willing, but the flesh was ready to split the difference between Europe and America, settle down in St. Maarten somewhere they served pink frozen cocktails with umbrellas in ’em, and call it a day.

  Asanti paced around the Orb with an expression Sal associated with first-time dog owners who’ve found that Puppy has left a biologically improbable mess on the floor. “You’re saying the Orb didn’t react at all.”

  Frances held a binder the size of a Manhattan phone book propped open on her arm. “No, Dr. Asanti. We had a slight non-localized brightness around 12:33 p.m. on Wednesday, associated with a gentle smell of roses, but aside from that—”

  “The bloody thing’s bust.” Liam collapsed in his chair, kicked up his feet, and meshed his fingers behind his head. “Great. We’re doomed.”

  “No sense being fatalist.” Grace stared into her own reflection in the Orb crystal. Its light painted her peach. “We didn’t need the Orb this time. If we work more closely with Sansone’s team, we should be able to muddle through.”

  “With all respect,” Frances said, “we’ve just started studying the Orb. We may find a way to reduce the gain, or extract meaningful information from the luminous data wash. I’m running experiments with computer models—”

  “Which will take too much time,” Grace cut in. Frances colored slightly. “I mean,” Grace continued, “I’m sure it’s a good idea. But it’s science, right? Could be done tomorrow, could take forever. We need a solution now.”