Sal drained espresso number six, and free-threw the empty cup into Liam’s trash can. “I hate to be a spoilsport, but I’m not, you know, ecstatic about the idea of relying on Team Two, even if Sansone is playing nice. For one thing, that puts us in a weird political situation. For another, Team Two still creeps me the fuck out.”
“I have a better idea,” Asanti said.
Liam tensed.
“We need to fix the Orb.”
Liam relaxed again. “Oh, yeah, sure. We definitely need to fix the Orb. Just have to settle the one tiny problem of no one knowing how to do that.”
“Its makers might.”
Father Menchú had spent the conversation so far reviewing paperwork at Asanti’s desk. He set the papers down, and pushed his glasses up on his nose. “No.”
“It’s not like we have a better option, Arturo.”
“You’re talking about violating at least a dozen rules and a papal bull. Literally any option would be better.”
“Team Four made the Orb.”
“Team Four was expelled. No one knows what happened to them, and the Vatican has forbidden magic’s use and study ever since. We were only allowed to keep using the Orb after they left because there was no better option.”
“And there still isn’t,” Asanti said. “I’m not proposing heresy, Arturo, just a fact-finding mission. The plans are in their vaults. Let’s go in and get them.”
Bookburners
Season 2, Episode 2
Webs
Andrea Phillips
1.
“I can’t believe they’re letting you do this.” Sal eyed the closed door with unveiled concern. The door itself could’ve been any one of a hundred doors at the Vatican—eight feet tall, cunningly paneled wood bound with black metal hinges. Its sole claim to distinction was the number IV nailed to it in gold.
Asanti’s eyes shone. “To be honest,” she said, “I can’t quite believe it either. If you’d told me even a month ago that this door would open in my lifetime, I’d have called you a liar.”
From farther down the hall, Siggy the Swiss Guard tried to look straight ahead with utterly perfect professional detachment. It didn’t work very well. Sal caught him glancing their way yet again, and stuck her tongue out. He jerked back to attention.
Asanti’s new assistants buzzed about her. Frances set down a mop and bucket against the wall next to the others, consulted a thick binder, and helped another of Asanti’s new staff, Sister Theresa, with a crate. The junior librarians had already filled the hallway with an army’s worth of cleaning and archival supplies—brooms, cleaning fluids, feather dusters. Asanti held a caddy filled with an assortment of soft cloths, gloves, and tiny brushes—the usual accoutrements, Sal suspected, for entering a room that had been closed off for a few hundred years. And a tiny velvet sack full of antique silver crosses, because this was no ordinary library they were walking into.
This library once belonged to Team Four. Magical R&D. Emphasis on the once.
“You’re not planning to move in there, are you?” Sal picked up a feather duster and ran her fingers through it. She looked sidelong at the extension cords and floodlights. “Don’t you think that’s a little much?”
“It’s not like they were wired for electricity, Sal. We don’t even know if Team Four dissolved before or after the Vatican brought in gas lighting.” Asanti nodded to her assistants, and they both began to pull on their dust masks and gloves.
Dissolved. That was a nice name for it. Sal had poked and pried as best she could, but in the end she’d concluded that nobody on her team was keeping secrets from her; it was just that nobody really knew what had happened to Team Four. “Something terrible,” Menchú had said. But there were a lot of kinds of terrible, ranging from “They accidentally summoned a demon that ate the whole team” all the way up to “That’s why nobody lives in Atlantis. Anymore.”
“I don’t know precisely,” Menchú had said, when she’d pressed. His forehead creased. “There are no records. I can only tell you what my predecessor told me. Something unspeakably terrible happened to Team Four—or maybe they did something unspeakably terrible. It’s really not clear. Their quarters were sealed, their members excommunicated, and the Vatican got out of the magical research business. Until recently.”
Sal snapped back to the present, to the quiet Vatican hallway filled with cleaning supplies. “But why do you think anything in Team Four’s library would even help?”
“Years back, we found a manuscript jammed into the back of a shelf—more of a pamphlet, really—which suggests that Team Four built the Orb in the first place.”
“So you just … waltz right in, grab the blueprints, and leave?”
“Don’t be silly. We don’t know how long it’ll take to turn up something useful. This place could be meticulously indexed and cross-referenced, or we could be looking for a needle in a haystack.” Asanti sounded positively delighted at the prospect.
“Still.” Sal gazed up at the door. “It’s been closed up a long time. Why the change of heart?”
Asanti smiled politely. “It’s been a long time since our little corner of the Vatican was run by anyone but a cardinal raised from one of the other teams. Before now, it would have been futile even to ask. So are you ready?”
“All right,” Sal said. She bounced on the balls of her feet. “Let’s see what Team Four left behind.”
Asanti took a key from her pocket. It was a heavy, ornate thing made of gold and iron twined together. The archivist pressed it into the lock. It turned smoothly, with the sort of heavy, satisfying click only found in items manufactured long before the age of plastics. Asanti looked to Sal, as if to gather one last drop of fortitude, and then set her palm on the door and pushed.
Nothing happened.
Asanti frowned. From down the hall, Siegfried made a sound that might have been a cough or a chuckle.
“Is it stuck?” Frances pushed her glasses down her nose. Theresa pulled her dust mask off.
“It’s been closed for hundreds of years,” Sal said, “and everyone’s tried to pretend the place doesn’t exist. Just a bit of rust.”
She sized up the door, and then rammed a shoulder into it. The impact didn’t even make a sound; she felt as if she’d hurled herself at a mountain. She tried again, and again. Fruitlessly. “They don’t make ’em like this anymore.” She rubbed her shoulder. “Maybe we should pour some Coke on it to eat away the rust.”
Frances raised an eyebrow, considering. Sister Theresa, though, looked as if Sal had just suggested exhuming a Pope. “That door is hundreds of years old!”
Sal shrugged. “One bit of rusted-out junk is as worthless as the next,” she said. “Getting into the room is more important than saving a couple of middle-aged hinges.”
Asanti ran a finger along the doorframe. “We could try that,” she said dubiously. “But we all heard it unlock—and the lock would have rusted before the hinges.”
“Maybe it’s barred from the inside,” Frances suggested, and opened her binder. Sal didn’t know what she might be looking for in there, and knew better than to ask.
“Who would have barred it? Team Four’s been dead for …” Sister Theresa trailed off. She glanced at Frances, who shrugged. “You mean someone might be dead? In there?” She drew back another step from the door.
Frances, on the other hand, leaned in. “Magic,” she said, a little too excited. “Has to be.” Dr. Haddad would learn some hard lessons before long, Sal thought. Magic had a way of disillusioning even the brightest, bushiest-tailed squirrels. But … the Orb’s existence suggested it was possible to use magic safely. And Team Four made the Orb, so …
Asanti stepped back from the door, thoughtful. “You know, maybe it is magic,” she said. She fished a cross from the velvet bag in her caddy. The silver was bright and clean. She pressed it to the door at eye level.
The cross didn’t tarnish, the way it did in the presence of demonic power. If anything, it grew clean
er and brighter. Asanti’s fingers rubied around the edges. Sal felt a thrumming run from her fingertips to her toes, as if she were a plucked guitar string. Her ears rang with a silent sound that faded.
“Did you hear—” Asanti started to say, her eyebrows just beginning to draw together.
The door swung open into blackness.
Asanti smiled like a queen before her court. Everyone else jumped back a foot or two.
Sal had half-expected a puff of dust, or at least a few scuttling spiders afraid of the light, but the hallway beyond the door looked utterly normal—a bit staid for the Vatican, even. Asanti lifted her caddy in one hand and a duster in the other. “Excellent. Let’s see what we’re dealing with,” she said. And then she stepped into the long-abandoned quarters of Team Four.
• • •
The hallway light didn’t illuminate much beyond the doorway. They appeared to be in a vestibule of some kind, with another doorway on the far side. The floor was smooth, the air cool and dry. Sal’s eyes had trouble adjusting to the blackness, but after a moment she realized it was because there was nothing to see.
Frances switched on a flashlight. It pointed straight down toward the floor in front of them, lit up for its first admirers in centuries. The stone was inlaid with an elaborate pentagram, because of course it was.
Sal crouched at the pentagram’s edge without touching it. “Asanti, is this dangerous?”
Asanti walked around the symbol. Her lips moved silently. Then, “No, it’s here for protection against evil,” she said. “Fairly straightforward. And we’re not evil, so—”
A voice came from the darkness; a breathy sound, like riffling through all the pages of an enormous book. “Num haec, domini, vobis species est nova?”
A loosely human shape stepped forward into the circle of Frances’s flashlight. The figure was massive, with shoulders comic-book broad and fists at least twice the size of its head. It was creamy in the light, and etched with lines of writing. A single richly illuminated letter occupied the space where the creature’s forehead would have been, if it had had a face. It was the letter V, in ornate gold and purple.
Sal shuddered, for a moment, remembering tattoos made with magic ink. Ink Kong here was entirely made of magic ink. But Team Four knew what it was doing, right? Unless they … didn’t. And at some point they’d clearly gotten in over their heads, one way or another.
Sister Theresa let out a soft, high sound. Frances trained the flashlight on Ink Kong, as if she’d been born to this job.
The creature stepped toward them and raised its fists high. “Respondete!”
Asanti started. “It’s Church Latin,” she murmured to Sal. “But that accent! I can hardly understand it. It seems to be some kind of guardian. I’ll ask it about the Orb.” She addressed the thing directly. “Orbe fracta Tertia Manus a te auxilium petit.”
The thing stared fixedly at them for a moment. Or at least its head seemed to point in their direction; it was anyone’s guess if it could even see properly. It settled closer to the ground, like a cat readying to pounce. “Morere, haeretici!” it roared. And then a dozen things happened all at once.
Asanti stepped back, stumbled, and fell.
Ink Kong leaped. On its way up it turned into a whirlwind of pages.
Frances dropped her flashlight; it rolled away, under something or over something, and vanished. Theresa screamed, high and loud.
Sal sprang in front of Asanti to protect her from this paper monster.
Ink Kong landed, reassembled, and punched.
Sal found herself lying on the floor in the center of that pentagram, gasping from the impact. By instinct, she rolled to the side, just in time to hear a fist hammer the floor where her head had been. It sounded like a solid block of wood striking rock.
Ink Kong caught Sal’s ankle with an enormous hand. She kicked out—the thing didn’t even try to duck. Her foot struck its head and rebounded, leaving as little damage to Kong as if she’d kicked a hundred-year-old oak. She snapped her cross from its chain, and twisted up to press it to the hand that held her.
Ink Kong plucked the cross from Sal’s fingers. A mouth appeared in its face, like a book falling open. The creature ate the cross, then pulled its fist back to deliver a punch Sal was sure would be the last.
And then there was a sudden cold shock. Sal realized she was wet. Ink Kong was even wetter, the ink smearing across its surface and dripping onto her face. Frances stood a few feet away, holding an empty bucket. Sal scrabbled at the fingers surrounding her ankle, and this time, pieces of them came away in big, wet clumps. “Again!” she shouted. “Get its head!”
Ink Kong punched at Sal once more, but this time she kicked free and regained her feet.
Asanti grabbed another bucket from where Theresa had let it fall, and tossed the bucket over Ink Kong’s head. Sal dodged around the creature, leapt on its back, and then, using teeth and fingernails, she shredded the thing. It grappled with her, thrashing, but it had trouble controlling its ruined fingers. As each scrap came away, it lost speed and power. “Sciant domini,” it gasped.
Finally, Sal knelt panting over a pile of lifeless papier-mâché, her hands coated and sticky.
“Well,” she said at last. “That was something.”
“Thank you,” Asanti said. She stared at the mound of wet paper scraps. “Are you all right?”
“Fine.” Sal straightened up. “I guess you can start whatever it is you meant to do in here, then.”
Theresa bit her lip, then nudged the remains of the paper monster into a garbage bag with a broom handle. She silently fished out Sal’s cross and offered it back.
“Um, thanks, but maybe I’ll use another one until that can be cleaned off,” Sal said.
“I want lights in that doorway to show us those stairs going down,” Asanti told Frances. “We need to get a good look at what we’re dealing with.” Frances heaved one of the floodlights across the foyer, careful not to drag it and scratch up the floor.
“I’m sorry I dropped the flashlight, Dr. Asanti.”
“Don’t mention it,” Asanti said, patting the other woman on the shoulder. “More wonders in heaven and earth, Frances.”
“What do you think that was?” Sal asked Asanti.
“A construct, maybe—like the Hand’s homunculus, or Mister Norse’s servant. It would make sense for Team Four not to leave their work unprotected. I should have expected something like—”
“Who do you think are ‘the masters’?” Sister Theresa asked Asanti.
Sal looked between the two of them. “Masters?”
“The construct’s last words.” Theresa bit her lip. “It said, ‘The masters will know,’ but who did it mean?”
Asanti gave her a quelling look. “No idea. But we have one way to find out.”
“Wait.” Wheels turned in Sal’s head. “There’s no way—I mean, Team Four is definitely gone, right? They can’t possibly still be—”
Frances turned the floodlight on with a loud thunk. The space beyond the door lit up—or some of it did. It was a yawning emptiness crossed with stairs and narrow walkways. They arched sideways, upside-down, meeting at impossible angles. Looking too closely at some of the junctions gave Sal a sharp headache, like an ice pick right between the eyes. A faint fluttering sound came from somewhere inside, and then subsided.
They stared at the tableau in silence for some moments.
Then Sal turned to Asanti. “I think we’ll need the rest of the team.”
2.
Sal slipped into Grace’s room. The apartment had changed a little since her last visit. It was still Spartan on the whole: the standard-issue convent furniture, the plain white walls. The unlit candle, the match standing at the ready, the sleeping woman.
Now, though, there was something stuck in the frame of the mirror. Sal slipped over to look—it was a photograph of the team dressed to the nines, tails and sparkles and sharp shoes, the night of the yacht party back on Rhodes. Damn, they�
��d all looked good. Maybe a little tense, but given that they’d made it out alive and saved the world, it was a happy memory. She smiled.
Sal struck the match and lit the candle. And just like that, Grace was there with her. She sat up in bed, a shadow of fear crossing over her face. “Arturo? Is he—”
“He’s fine,” Sal reassured her. “And he said he was very, very sorry, and he’ll try to make it up to you. He sent me because we need you. He’s stuck in a meeting with the monsignors.”
“Ah. Just … give me a moment.” Grace crossed over to the mirror and straightened her hair, then pulled open the drawer of her night table. It was packed with the paraphernalia of modern womanhood: countless tubes and pots of creams and powders; a dozen or more brushes; an eyelash curler; a hair curler. There were even things in there Sal didn’t have a name for.
Sal whistled. “That’s a real nice collection you’ve got there.”
Grace colored faintly, but continued drawing a thick line of liquid liner, finishing with a neat cat eye. “It changes so fast now, especially for me. But I miss it.”
“What, fashion?”
Grace swept a rosy gloss onto her lips, then pressed them together. “Don’t laugh.”
“But why the new look?”
Grace tipped her head to the side and admired her work. “An old look. I’ve lost enough time on wishful thinking and feeling sorry for myself. However much time I have, I’ll spend it being myself.”
• • •
They found Liam and Asanti waiting in the hall outside the Team Four door. Frances and Theresa were halfway to Team Three’s door, whispering to each other. Or rather, Sister Theresa was whispering to Frances, and Frances was determinedly not looking at Liam.
Interesting.
So—had Theresa noticed Dr. Haddad, ah, noticing Liam? Sal couldn’t blame her, if so. The man was good-looking. All that luminous skin, and he certainly kept in shape. Good thing their brief fling had ended, and Sal wasn’t the jealous type. She was so unjealous, in fact, that she favored Liam with an excessively warm smile.
Bookburners The Complete Season Two Page 5
