Bookburners The Complete Season Two

by Max Gladstone

  Grace yanked her attention back to the here and now. She had a job, a purpose. No time for daydreams.

  On an ordinary night, this was probably a quiet street. Tonight, in addition to the emergency workers, it looked like half the residents were awake and out of their houses, some barefoot, others showing signs of having hastily dressed. A man in a loosely belted robe was yelling at a fireman, accompanying the tirade with wild gestures that—coupled with his unkempt appearance—lent him the air of a mildly deranged prophet. A paramedic attempted to gently, then forcefully, steer him in the direction of a waiting ambulance.

  “So much for the local authorities not being in the loop,” said Sal.

  Liam shrugged. “They still look plenty confused to me.”

  Grace couldn’t disagree, but having nothing to add, held her peace. The locals were clearly reacting to something, but for whatever reason, the emergency workers weren’t seeing it.

  The other thing that no one seemed to be seeing was a little boy sitting in front of the half-raised garage door of one of the houses.

  Wordlessly, Grace tapped Menchú on the shoulder and pointed. The boy wasn’t looking at anything in the street, but at the same time, didn’t have the unfocused stare of those blinded by their own private visions.

  “Does anyone speak Turkish?” asked Menchú.

  “Only enough to buy coffee and cigarettes,” said Liam. He shrugged at Sal’s silent question. “I wasn’t always such a shining example of clean living.”

  Menchú sighed. “That’s it. Everyone is going to learn at least one new language a year from now on.”

  “Or what?” asked Grace.

  “Or I’ll keep sighing about it a lot.”

  “Stop sighing,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I speak Turkish.”

  Grace liked Menchú’s expression when she surprised him. It reminded her of how he looked when they first met.

  • • •

  Grace approached the boy cautiously. She didn’t want to scare him, or whatever parent or caretaker might be keeping a distracted eye on him in the middle of the confusion.

  “Hello,” she began. Her Turkish had never gotten past the basics, but greetings were a safe place to start.

  The boy gave no sign that he had heard.

  Grace hunkered down near him, resting her weight easily on the balls of her feet. “Do you need help?”

  The boy turned himself slightly to watch the dead end of the street, opposite the side blocked off by police and fire trucks. Closer, she was even more sure that his gaze was focused, not the vacant stare of a victim of shock or trauma.

  “What are you looking at?” she asked.

  The boy turned, blinked at her. She suspected it was a question none of the emergency workers had thought to ask. “The man with the donkey,” he said, and turned back to watch the end of the street.

  Grace followed his gaze. And found that she could see them too.

  The man was dressed in mud-spattered furs, soft-side in, designed for hard wear and long travel. The donkey was laden with packs piled so high they dwarfed the animal itself.

  They were both almost entirely translucent; any color they had possessed in life had long ago bled away.

  The man leaned down as though to speak to the donkey and the two of them walked through the wall of houses and out of sight.

  • • •

  Sal took a deep breath and asked for clarification. “A ghost?” she said. “An actual, honest-to-God ghost?” When Grace nodded, she shuddered.

  They had left the scene and were circling around to the street one block over, in the direction the man and his donkey had gone. “That is too freaky.”

  “That is too freaky?” said Liam. “Sal, you’ve been possessed by a demon, violently exorcised, and then you died. After all that, you’re telling me a dead guy with a pack animal is a step too far?”

  “I know it doesn’t make sense,” said Sal. “I just don’t like ghosts. Blame camp.”

  “Boot camp?”

  “Summer camp. Where you had to stay up late in the dark woods and pretend not to be scared when the counselors started telling stories about the Girl with the Golden Arm or Bloody Mary, or whatever it was. I don’t like dead things that don’t have bodies.”

  “Demons don’t always have bodies,” Menchú pointed out.

  “Demons didn’t used to be alive. There’s a difference.”

  “But—”

  “Not logical.” Sal pointed to herself. “Aware it’s not logical. Doesn’t stop it from being true. Don’t worry, I can deal. Just give me a minute to have the heebie-jeebies over here.”

  Grace, at the head of their little line, looked back and asked, “Are you done with that yet?”

  Sal stopped, suspicious. “Why?”

  Grace pointed to the empty street about ten meters ahead of them. “Because the man and the donkey are right there.”

  Sal blinked, and there they were. A ghost man and a ghost donkey, peaceably making their way up the street as though it were the most normal thing in the world.

  Sal tried to tell herself that the reality of looking at a ghost was not as bad as she had feared it would be. The whole translucent there-not-there thing was weird as hell, but there was no blood, no grotesque signs of death. They were just minding their own business.

  Nope, still completely freaky.

  “Is it strange that we can only see them once they’ve been pointed out to us?” she asked.

  “I think the strange part is that the ambulance workers didn’t,” said Liam.

  “Ah.” Menchú sounded like he had been mulling that one over. “If someone told you they were hallucinating, would you ask them to show you what they were seeing?”

  “Sure,” said Liam.

  “Before you joined the Society?”

  “Probably not,” he admitted.

  Grace cleared her throat. “Aside from Sal’s campfire stories, do any of you actually know anything about ghosts?”

  A heavy silence fell. The man and the donkey kept walking. At least now they were moving down the street, not through any of the buildings. By unspoken agreement, the team followed half a block behind.

  Menchú spoke softly as they went on. “Traditionally, ghosts are the wandering souls of the restless dead. They remain on Earth because they have been bound in some way, or because they have unfinished business to complete.”

  Liam held up his smartphone and snapped a picture. He checked the screen. “And they don’t appear in photographs.”

  “That’s great,” said Sal. “How do we get rid of them?”

  “At a guess, I’d say we should start by determining what brought them here.”

  Liam already had his phone to his ear. “Hey, Asanti. If we describe a ghost to you, can you or one of your minions tell us when and where he’s from?” There was a pause as Liam listened to the other side of the line. “Yes, we’re sure.” There was another pause. Off Sal’s questioning look, Liam shrugged. “Asanti says that ghosts have never been proven to exist. I don’t know whether she’s excited to have documentation of a new phenomenon or if she’s annoyed at me for being so obviously wrong about what’s going on.” He addressed the phone again, “I know you can hear me… Well, if we’re wrong then prove me wrong… Fine then. I’m putting Father Menchú on the line.”

  Menchú hesitated, then took the phone and brought Asanti up to speed. He kept it professional, but then again, they were in the middle of what might be a crisis, so that only made sense. Right? There was no sign that the man or the donkey heard them, or if they did, that they cared.

  Then Sal stopped worrying about Menchú and Asanti and whatever was going on between them and worried about herself. The man and his donkey had been joined by a small family group traveling on a cart. The cart wasn’t being pulled by anything. Sal decided the lack of another ghost animal was not an improvement. Menchú noticed when Sal missed a step, saw the new ghosts, and passed
along their descriptions as well.

  After a few more minutes, he hung up the phone. “Asanti’s best guess is that we are looking at something in the form of a first- or second-century Central Asian trader.”

  “Still not willing to confirm it’s a ghost?” said Liam.

  “Several ghosts,” corrected Sal.

  “Not yet,” said Menchú.

  Sal wrinkled her nose. “Does she know what they’re doing?”

  “Asanti thinks it has something to do with the reason we have jurisdiction here. Antakya, or, more accurately, Antioch, was a western terminus of the old Silk Road connecting Rome with China and India. Technically, the trade route went all the way to Rome, but this was the border of the Roman Empire, so close enough.”

  “But why now?” asked Grace. “The Silk Road has been closed for centuries; these people have been dead for even longer. Why are we seeing streets full of ghosts tonight?”

  “Full of ghosts is a bit of an exaggeration,” said Menchú.

  A train of pack mules and accompanying traders joined the procession. The team had to step aside so as to avoid being walked over—although it was unclear that the mules cared. One passing beside Grace snuffled in her direction, but on the whole, the group behaved as though the team wasn’t there.

  “Maybe not much of an exaggeration,” Menchú allowed.

  “Still waiting for an answer,” said Grace.

  The team followed the ghosts as they reached the end of the street and passed through a half-ruined archway and into a plaza beyond.

  “Hang on,” said Sal, “Where did the man with the donkey go?”

  The rest of the procession was still there. The family and their cart, the line of pack mules and their drivers, but the man with the donkey was nowhere to be seen.

  “Interesting,” said Menchú.

  “We have a bigger problem,” said Grace.

  “I’m not sure that ghosts disappearing on their own is actually a problem,” said Sal.

  Grace crossed her arms. “Maybe not, but has anyone seen Liam since we passed through that arch?”

  The ghosts walked on through the silent plaza. Liam was nowhere to be seen.

  • • •

  One moment Liam was walking with the rest of the team, attention half on not tripping, half on his phone. Fortunately, ghosts weren’t quite as rough on electronics as demons were. Although his phone was not exactly happy about what was going on around him, it was at least still readable.

  It was when he stepped from cobblestones onto hard-packed earth that he first noticed that something was wrong. A second later there was a blast of cold air, and Liam looked up only to find that the rest of his team—and the city—had disappeared.

  That was… not good. The man with the donkey was still there, though. And he looked perfectly solid, opaque, and in living color.

  Nope, Liam thought. Not good at all.

  4.

  After twenty minutes of searching for Liam in the darkened streets of Antakya, first silently, then calling his name—disturbing the residents be damned—it was apparent that whatever had happened to Liam, he hadn’t wandered off in search of coffee or cigarettes.

  “He had his phone,” Sal said. “Can we locate that?”

  Grace frowned. “I’m sure Liam could, but since he’s the one who has gone missing, that’s not really helpful.”

  “I think we should assume that something supernatural has occurred and that tracing cell phones will be of limited use,” said Menchú.

  “Why are we assuming that?” asked Sal.

  “Because the other option that comes to mind is that he was abducted out from under our noses, in which case we are dealing with professionals who will either contact us for ransom or who will attempt to extract information before killing Liam. All told, the most reassuring option is that he disappeared to wherever the man with the donkey has gone.”

  Sal felt her stomach go cold. We just needed to go on a mission together. To be a team again. This wasn’t the way this was supposed to work out.

  • • •

  The man with the donkey paused, and for lack of anything better to do, Liam approached him. The rest of the world was indistinct. Liam felt as though he was on a road, but when he tried to look around, he found it hard to tell whether he was walking through a city, over plains, or along a treacherous mountain pass.

  In the distance, off the path, he could see tiny lights blink on and off. Liam resolutely ignored them. He was doing his best not to think about the fact that he was trapped in some kind of ghost realm, isolated from his friends, and with no apparent route back to where he’d come from. But he was dead certain—no, bad choice of words, make that absolutely certain—that leaving the path was about the dumbest thing he could do. So he kept his eyes, and his attention, on the man with the donkey.

  “Hello, Liam,” said the man. Because of course the ghost of an ancient Mongol knew his name and spoke perfect modern English.

  “Hello,” said Liam. Because being rude to ghosts was probably a bad idea.

  He was half waiting for the trader to say something creepy and portentous as a follow-up, but apparently the trader wasn’t much of a conversationalist, and having fulfilled the demands of courtesy, he turned and continued on his way.

  Liam took a deep and shuddering breath. Get a grip, he told himself. You’re in some kind of weird ghost dimension where long-dead Silk Road traders know your name. This is nothing like having your brain hijacked by a demon for a couple of years.

  The problem with lying to yourself, Liam decided, was that you knew when you were full of shit.

  After his possession, Liam had briefly seen a spiritual counselor who repeatedly advised against what he termed “negative self-talk.” He thought it wasn’t healthy for Liam to blame himself for what he might have done while he was under demonic influence. Liam had tried that for a while, but found that relentless positivity only made him uncomfortable. Maybe Sal was right about his deeply rooted Catholic guilt. Maybe growing up in a working-class household in Belfast was just too much to kick. Whatever the reason, Liam eventually made his peace with the idea that a little mild verbal abuse was more relaxing to him than a hundred people saying that everything was going to be okay.

  If no one was around to supply it… Well, Liam hadn’t been raised to be dependent on others either.

  Liam squeezed his fists hard enough to hear his knuckles crack and feel the pain of his blunt nails digging into his palms. He could still feel. He was in control.

  If you can feel pain, he reminded himself, it means your body is here, not there. The others will notice that you’re missing. They will be working to bring you back. All you have to do is get your head out of your arse, and do your share to meet them in the damn middle.

  Liam took another breath and looked at his surroundings again. He was definitely on a road. The area outside of the road continued to be dark and shifting. Now it looked like a modern cityscape, a few seconds later, it became a deserted mountain border crossing. It was always night, and the blinking lights in the distance continued to wink in and out. Liam remembered the giant glowing spiders in the Team Four library, decided ignoring the lights was still the smart call, and turned his attention to the other people on the path.

  The man and the donkey were becoming more vague as they moved forward into the distance. Liam jogged after them and found it only took a few steps to be back beside them again. The man raised an eyebrow, but otherwise ignored him.

  Okay, intent is more important than distance here. See something, walk toward it, and you’re there. Good to know.

  Reassured that he wasn’t going to lose sight of his one reference point, Liam let his attention wander. Unlike in Antakya, where the ghosts had seemed at least roughly matched in terms of historical period, here the people on the road were much more varied.

  There were men, women, even children, dressed for every kind of weather and out of every culture he could think of. He spotted a g
irl, maybe in her late teens, walking along the road with a small suitcase in one hand and her Colombian passport clutched in the other. What the hell is she doing in Turkey?

  Liam snorted to himself. If this is Turkey, I’m the Pope.

  But if this wasn’t Turkey, where was it?

  This is the Silk Road.

  But that phrase brought something very specific to Liam’s mind, and it wasn’t ancient traders.

  Liam scanned the people on the road with more intent. Now that he was looking for people, the road seemed more densely populated, as though summoned by his subconscious. Liam did his best not to think about what that implied and focused on the matter at hand. Who would be here?

  As soon as Liam asked himself the question, figures began to pop out from the crowd, as though lit with a spotlight only he could see.

  Three men in Afghan dress who Liam would have bet money were at least part-time poppy farmers.

  What about…? And there was a group of illegal gun dealers. Liam didn’t recognize their faces, but he had spent enough cold nights by the docks with older brothers who thought it was cute to bring a kid with them when they did their less than legal business to recognize the type easily enough. Pale, hard men.

  No matter what the movies implied, hackers didn’t all look like stringy-haired white guys in dirty basements, but once he was looking, Liam could see them: Eastern European identity thieves, Asian government-employed black hats, and yes, a couple of bored college students and general anarchists for good measure.

  Liam didn’t approve of messing with magic, but that just meant he paid even more attention to the practical knowledge that the team had picked up over the years. Sympathy, he knew from Asanti’s more enthusiastic ramblings on the subject, could be created by similarity of form, like a voodoo doll, by congruency of place, like their little stunt at Rhodes… or by using the same name to bind objects or places separated by time and space.